Senior Vice President Business Finance — Research Platform Capacity and Product Returns

The mandate

A financial-research and information platform is creating an SVP business-finance role across four regional product lines. Product leaders currently plan analyst capacity, technology spending and client commitments separately, making it difficult to see which research investments earn durable contribution. The executive will hold regional planning and investment-challenge accountability beyond any single delivery team. Employment is open-ended, with the first eighteen months devoted to a common product-economics model and a stronger connection between commercial commitments, research capacity and realised client value.

The work must recognise that research quality and independence cannot be reduced to billable utilisation. Different products combine recurring subscriptions, bespoke analysis and service-level obligations, each consuming senior analyst capacity differently. You will establish how coverage expansion, revision demand and client concentration affect the cost of maintaining credible output. Product cases should distinguish revenue created by new capability from revenue retained through necessary service investment. Finance will make trade-offs visible without dictating research conclusions or weakening the quality standards that support the business's long-term reputation.

Twenty-two colleagues will work through product-finance and planning leads. You own the regional business forecast, financial concurrence for product investment and the evidence presented at portfolio reviews. Research leaders retain professional methodology and quality decisions; commercial leaders own sales execution. The regional managing director and global CFO approve material investment reallocations and major client commitments. You can require revised economics or suspend financial concurrence where capacity assumptions are unsupported, but cannot pressure analysts to reach particular conclusions or override independence protections to achieve a margin target.

At the end of the opening agenda, leaders should understand which products fund their required capacity, where scarce specialists constrain growth and which investment choices deserve staged release. Forecasts must reconcile commercial pipeline to deliverable output rather than assume unlimited analyst availability. Mumbai is the base, with planned regional visits to research and commercial teams. The enduring SVP responsibility includes developing product-finance leaders, conducting post-launch reviews and ensuring that cost optimisation preserves the capabilities clients actually depend on rather than rewarding indiscriminate capacity reduction.

What you will own

• Define product contribution models that identify recurring service obligations, specialist analyst capacity and shared technology dependencies, avoiding allocations that make a product appear profitable only by transferring its true support cost elsewhere.
• Decide financial review gates for new coverage and analytical products, requiring evidence of client demand, deliverable capacity and staged investment before proposals enter the regional resource plan.
• Build a capacity forecast connecting pipeline conversion, renewal commitments and revision workload, exposing where commercial growth depends on scarce expertise that cannot be recruited or trained within the assumed period.
• Challenge cost-optimisation proposals against research quality and client-service requirements, distinguishing redundant work from capacity that protects independence, continuity or contractually promised response standards.
• Present regional portfolio alternatives that quantify product expansion, deferral and shared-service trade-offs, giving the managing director a decision basis beyond isolated product revenue growth or headline utilisation.
• Establish post-launch financial reviews with research and commercial leaders, tracing results to demand and capacity assumptions and feeding the learning into subsequent product funding rather than retrospective blame.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring twenty-two to twenty-eight years of finance experience across financial services, research, information services or an analytically intensive professional business. Show regional or multi-product planning responsibility and a resource decision you changed because delivery capacity did not support the commercial forecast. Evidence should identify your own judgement and decision influence rather than only your team's modelling output.
• Demonstrate strong business-finance and management-accounting skills with Chartered Accountancy or comparable professional grounding. You must analyse product contribution without assuming every research cost is discretionary or every senior analyst hour is billable. Explain how you have treated recurring service obligations, shared capability and client concentration in a financial model that business leaders accepted as useful and fair.
• Evidence stakeholder leadership where quality or professional independence constrained an apparently simple margin improvement. Describe how you challenged cost or investment choices while respecting specialist authority, and how you made the economic consequence visible to executives. Experience in financial-services operations should include a clear understanding of the reputational and commercial damage caused by forcing analytical output to follow a predetermined financial target.
• Have developed business-finance teams capable of working across product and geographic boundaries. You should be comfortable defending a portfolio recommendation, revising assumptions when operating evidence contradicts them and establishing a disciplined post-launch review. Secure handling of client information and practical collaboration with research, technology and commercial leaders are necessary for a role whose authority depends on analytical credibility as well as title.

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 13 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-014.