Vice President Finance — Enterprise Subscription Economic Retention

The mandate

An HR-technology platform is retaining enterprise customers through offers whose financial value is not consistently tested. A renewed subscription can preserve headline recurring value while demanding persistent specialist support, repeated reconfiguration or a price concession that consumes the contribution. The platform is creating a VP finance seat for economic retention and renewal investment. Employment is open-ended; the first eighteen months establish cohort and investment discipline, after which the function continues owning the financial choices around the evolving enterprise subscription base.

The central view follows the same renewable customer population through retained value, expansion, contraction and churn, separating new acquisition from the cohort being assessed. A few large expansions can conceal losses elsewhere, and customer count can remain stable while the retained base becomes more expensive to serve. Finance will connect that movement to supported recurring costs and the incremental investment proposed to secure renewal. Customer-success owners supply service and support evidence; sales owns negotiation; product owners assess feasible reconfiguration. The VP compares contribution and payback without assuming that retention itself is always the financially correct outcome.

Twelve finance colleagues work with sales and customer-success leaders. You approve ordinary renewal-investment concurrence and rescue-budget allocation within the agreed financial envelope, require supported cost assumptions and recommend cessation where continuing investment lacks an economic rationale. The chief executive and board reserve material concessions, new capacity commitments and strategic customer exceptions. Sales and product retain their customer and technical decisions. Contract-to-record processing, revenue recognition and milestone billing remain with the controller organisation. The remit does not include implementing customer configurations, directing support staff or changing the roadmap to make a finance scenario appear achievable.

The initial agenda should create a cohort renewal bridge, supported cost-to-retain scenarios and a controlled investment record showing what each offer was intended to achieve. Bengaluru is the hybrid base with selected customer-owner workshops. Continuing leadership includes reviewing actual retention and contribution against the approved rationale, recognising that finance cannot attribute every outcome to one concession or intervention. Directors should see whether a rescued customer can sustain value after the offer ends, whether incremental capacity is still justified and when a sunset choice is preferable, rather than celebrate retention while repeatedly funding the same unresolved economic weakness.

What you will own

• Establish the renewable-cohort bridge through retained value, expansion, contraction and churn, keeping new customer acquisition separate so an aggregate growth figure cannot conceal deterioration in the established subscription base.
• Decide ordinary renewal-investment concurrence within delegation through supported contribution and payback scenarios, distinguishing a deliberate rescue investment from repeated concessions whose ongoing service cost makes retention economically weak.
• Build cost-to-retain evidence with customer-success and product owners, retaining recurring support and reconfiguration assumptions without asserting technical feasibility or treating every customer interaction as a cost caused by the renewal offer.
• Set rescue-budget allocation and reappraisal conditions against the approved envelope, requiring an explicit exception where additional capacity or a material commercial concession exceeds the finance function's authority.
• Challenge retention and expansion scenarios through concentration and downside review, showing when strong growth in a few customers masks churn or contraction that changes the cohort's supported contribution.
• Present continuation, staged-investment and sunset alternatives to executive review, preserving strategic customer choices while making the financial consequence of retaining an unprofitable relationship explicit rather than hiding it in a retention target.
• Develop renewal-finance deputies and review actual outcomes against the retained investment rationale, recording attribution limits and changed facts so later decisions learn from evidence without retroactively claiming every successful renewal was caused by finance's offer.

Candidate qualifications

• Explain a subscription, digital-platform or comparable recurring-services finance decision where customer retention did not necessarily preserve economic value. Identify the continuing cost, proposed concession and contribution scenario you personally challenged. The evidence must establish a real investment choice and subsequent review, not merely a customer margin table or a general statement that churn reduction was commercially important.
• Demonstrate cohort analysis that separated expansion, contraction and churn within the same renewable population, including a concentration effect hidden by aggregate growth. Show how source definitions and customer-owner evidence changed your interpretation. You must distinguish new acquisition from retained-base movement and avoid treating customer count or one headline retention measure as proof that the subscription base can sustain its contribution.
• Bring 12–18 years in finance with head-of-function, director or fractional CFO responsibility in a scaling platform. ACCA, relevant finance education or comparable professional grounding must support rigorous planning and commercial judgement. Show your own rescue-budget or renewal-investment concurrence and effective use of product and customer-success expertise, preserving material executive approvals and qualified controller ownership of financial treatment outside this function.
• Show development of a compact finance team that maintained renewal scenarios and an investment record independently. Explain how you reviewed an outcome without overclaiming that one offer caused it, and what triggered further investment, restraint or cessation. Secure customer information and constructive overseas stakeholder work are required. The VP must challenge a retention target candidly while respecting the strategic customer's approved exception and the operating owners' delivery decisions.

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 8 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-145.