Finance Service-Level Economics Advisory Director

The mandate

The adviser will help finance determine which service commitments genuinely protect value and which create cost or complexity without a commensurate outcome. Current discussions treat faster response and higher availability as universally better. The standing question is what level of service each finance activity requires when control, decision timing, failure consequence and total economic cost are considered together.

For two days each week, the director will examine selected service promises, develop decision economics and coach process owners through trade-offs. A fortnightly virtual clinic will resolve analytical issues; one on-site forum each quarter will address choices that require senior risk or investment judgement. The adviser supplies challenge and framing, not ongoing service management.

The analysis will include demand variability, peak capacity, retained work, failure demand, control recovery, user waiting and the cost of exceptions. The adviser should distinguish measures that influence a finance outcome from attractive response statistics. Where a premium service is warranted, its benefit, eligibility and exit condition must be explicit so every request does not migrate upward.

The role carries no line authority and cannot change service levels, contracts, staffing or process design. Management makes those decisions and owns implementation. The adviser may recommend that a stated commitment be withdrawn, tiered or subjected to a trial. Any interest involving a service provider must be declared before reviewing commercially sensitive information.

At completion, finance should have an economic method, a small set of differentiated service choices and a record of consequences accepted by accountable leaders. The final advice will identify which claims remain assumption-led and where management has consciously chosen resilience, control or stakeholder value over lowest cost.

What you will own

• Create a service-value framework combining financial consequence, decision criticality, control reliance, demand pattern and total cost.
• Test selected service commitments against actual demand, failure, rework, retained effort and peak-capacity evidence.
• Distinguish outcome-leading measures from response statistics that can improve without changing finance performance.
• Design differentiated service tiers with clear eligibility, escalation, premium economics and exit conditions.
• Recommend trials where evidence is weak, including baseline, counter-metric and decision date.
• Challenge universal or inherited commitments that impose cost without demonstrated enterprise value.
• Record management's control, resilience or stakeholder choices transparently when lowest cost is not the objective.
• Leave an independent decision method; management retains all service, contract, staffing and implementation authority.

Candidate qualifications

• Show senior analysis of finance service economics beyond rate cards or simple labour cost comparison.
• Provide an example where a faster or more available service measure failed to improve the relevant finance outcome.
• Demonstrate treatment of failure demand, retained work, peak capacity, control consequence and user delay.
• Evidence advice that led to differentiated service rather than uniform escalation of every commitment.
• Show ability to represent value choices fairly when evidence did not support a single mathematically dominant option.
• Describe how process owners continued using an economic decision method after your involvement.
• Disclose current relationships with service providers or implementation firms that may create conflicts.

Working terms and boundaries

• The retainer covers two days a week, one fortnightly virtual clinic and one on-site executive forum each quarter.
• Additional provider negotiation, implementation or travel requires a separate written scope and fee.
• The adviser cannot approve service levels, contracts, staffing, process changes or investment.
• Management supplies demand, cost, failure and control evidence and owns resulting decisions.
• Provider conflicts must be declared before access and throughout the six-month term.

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 FNA-ADV-2026-CPH-24.