Director, Record-to-Report Service Exception Governance

The mandate

A financial-services global business services function has improved close-task timeliness while accumulating exceptions that remain open with retained finance teams. Its dashboard reports completion, but the boundary between prepared, reviewed and accepted work is not consistently enforced. The Director will own service-level governance for record-to-report delivery, making the quality and destination of unresolved work as visible as throughput.

The position is permanent with open-ended employment and a twenty-four-month initial agenda. Three delivery pods will use a common exception and review framework, adapted to the control responsibilities retained by the entities they serve. Early work establishes reliable definitions and decision routes; subsequent cycles develop leadership capability and reduce recurring handoff failures through practical service changes agreed with the relevant controllers.

An exception can be technically small but operationally significant if it prevents the retained team from making a reporting judgement on time. Conversely, a material accounting question may be properly owned outside GBS and should not be closed by a service manager to protect a target. The Director distinguishes preparation defects, missing review and genuine judgement dependencies, preserving the evidence needed by the authorised accounting owner.

The role controls service priorities, reviewer capacity and operating improvements within the finance services delegation. Entity controllers own accounting policy, material adjustments and financial statement approval; independent control functions retain their review responsibilities. Changes to service scope or accepted risk require the Global Finance Services Head and designated stakeholders. The seat does not sign statutory accounts, override a controller's accounting conclusion or undertake a broad commercial finance planning remit.

By the end of the first year, reported completion should reflect accepted deliverables rather than simply uploaded files, and every material open exception should have a decision owner and credible next action. The second year strengthens cross-pod leadership and durable correction of recurrent service defects. Continuing accountability includes service talent, governance and retained-finance relationships as delivery volumes and entity needs change.

What you will own

• Establish exception categories that distinguish preparation errors, absent source facts and retained-controller judgement dependencies, enabling service leaders to escalate the right issue rather than close every item against one ageing target.
• Decide service review capacity and priority rules through financial significance and close dependencies, protecting scarce specialist attention from being consumed solely by the largest volume of routine tasks.
• Govern deliverable acceptance definitions with retained finance teams, making the distinction between submitted, reviewed and accepted work explicit in reported service performance and escalation discussions.
• Build an exception movement record showing owner, next action and supporting evidence, preventing unresolved items from appearing newly opened each month when their underlying cause has never changed.
• Lead root-cause reviews of repeated handoff defects, assigning operating corrections within GBS and securing appropriate controller decisions where the solution depends on retained accounting authority.
• Produce service governance packs that reconcile throughput to accepted quality and residual exposure, explaining whether an improved completion measure reflects real control progress or a changed classification convention.
• Develop pod leaders through live retained-finance challenge meetings, strengthening delegation, substantive review and calm communication when delivery quality must be defended or a service limitation acknowledged.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate senior finance shared-services, R2R operations or controllership service leadership with multi-team delivery responsibility. Describe an operation where completed tasks did not mean accepted close work, the weakness you identified and the governance change implemented. Evidence should show an improved handoff or review decision rather than merely a revised service dashboard that retained the same unresolved exposures.
• Bring practical understanding of reconciliation preparation, review and exception escalation across retained and service teams. The director must recognise accounting judgement that cannot legitimately be exercised inside GBS. Explain a difficult ownership dispute, the evidence supplied to the authorised controller and how you maintained service continuity without hiding the unresolved issue or approving an adjustment outside delegation.
• Show strong operating analytics and process-improvement judgement, including meaningful ageing, recurrence and acceptance measures. Relevant evidence should trace a recurring defect to its cause, test the proposed repair and observe subsequent close cycles. Digital transformation or continuous-improvement methods may support the work, but a project label cannot substitute for a substantiated improvement in service quality and control.
• Establish a record of developing service managers and influencing senior retained-finance stakeholders across regions. This remit requires review-capacity decisions, constructive challenge and transparent limitation reporting. Describe a service target you changed or refused to meet cosmetically, your personal leadership contribution and the agreed operating result, including material residual exceptions that remained visible after improvement.

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 12 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-061.