Senior Vice President, Business Finance — Depository Services

The mandate

A depository-services platform is expanding its account and transaction base while investing in technology and service capacity. Its financial plans currently treat activity growth as a largely uniform driver, obscuring the differences between routine transactions, complex servicing and account-maintenance obligations. The SVP will own ongoing business-finance leadership, enabling executives to compare growth and investment choices using economics that reflect the actual work and financial resources each proposition requires.

Sixteen planning and business-finance professionals support the remit. The leader will set planning standards and challenge investment cases, while operations retain settlement and service execution and compliance retains specialised interpretation. Material pricing, technology commitments and new propositions need the appropriate executive approvals. Finance will not promise that a lower unit cost makes an operating model safe; it will obtain the assurance evidence necessary before endorsing its financial case.

Employment is open-ended, with an initial eighteen-month agenda for service economics, investment planning and performance accountability. Mumbai is the base, supported by selected operating-centre visits. Planning must distinguish market-driven activity changes from operating improvement and identify which costs can change with demand. The leader will preserve reconciliation to reported results rather than allow useful analytical measures to become an uncontrolled alternative performance system.

Long-term success includes a business-finance team able to support decisions before resources are committed and revisit those decisions as actual demand changes. The role excludes custody or settlement authority, statutory audit sign-off and technology architecture. It still demands informed challenge of service and investment assumptions, especially where revenue growth relies on capacity or control capabilities whose cost is omitted or whose readiness has not been verified by the accountable specialist.

What you will own

• Establish service economics that separate transaction processing, account maintenance and complex support, reconciling activity measures to financial results and showing where growth changes the cost and margin mix.
• Recommend technology and operating investment priorities with demand scenarios, identifying which commitments protect essential capability and which depend on unverified revenue or productivity assumptions that require further evidence.
• Govern rolling forecasts using documented activity and cost drivers, distinguishing market movement from execution performance so executives do not attribute every favourable result to an operating improvement.
• Challenge proposition business cases for complete support and control costs, obtaining specialist readiness evidence while retaining accountability for the financial recommendation rather than approving the operating or compliance design.
• Present business performance alternatives to the executive committee, explaining where pricing, service mix or investment timing could improve resilience and what financial consequences each choice would create.
• Develop business-finance managers who can work with service and technology leaders, investigate analytical-to-ledger differences and maintain controlled assumptions without turning routine business questions into repeated escalation to the SVP.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring an 18–22-year finance career with VP-level or comparable accountability in depository operations, securities services, NBFCs or related financial-services businesses. Demonstrate a planning or investment decision you personally influenced using service economics. The selection discussion will distinguish business-finance judgement from routine reporting and will examine how you understood the financial consequence of different activity or customer-service patterns.
• Have strong budgeting, forecasting and management-accounting methods, supported by rigorous finance education. Explain how you reconciled activity-based analysis to reported results and separated market-driven growth from genuine productivity. You do not need a statutory auditor licence for this seat, but must recognise the independent operational, risk and compliance inputs required before endorsing a high-consequence service investment.
• Show constructive challenge of operating and technology sponsors when proposed growth or savings omitted material support requirements. Evidence should include a case you revised, the assumptions you tested and the executive decision that followed. A persuasive dashboard is not enough; the candidate must demonstrate how analysis changed a resource choice and how the result was reviewed after spending began.
• Have led finance analysts or managers through a clear planning framework, with delegation, model review and concise executive communication. You should be comfortable examining service-centre evidence and acknowledging data limitations without making every decision impossible. The permanent SVP must build a team capable of maintaining useful financial challenge while respecting specialised securities-service authority outside the business-finance remit.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 9 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-122.