Senior Vice President, Capital Allocation — Financial Services Investments

The mandate

A financial-services group is considering investments in distribution, technology-enabled propositions and operating capabilities across several business units. Cases arrive with different return measures and optimistic assumptions about shared benefits, making comparison difficult. The SVP will create a permanent capital-allocation discipline that examines opportunity cost and execution dependencies before the investment committee commits resources, without becoming a deal sponsor for every proposal.

The initial two-year agenda is a comparable investment framework, a staged allocation process and a meaningful post-investment review book. Employment is open-ended. Twelve specialists will support appraisal and portfolio strategy, working with business finance and technical experts. Mumbai attendance is important for committee interaction; targeted regional travel will examine the operating assumptions behind major cases rather than serve as a routine tour of portfolio companies.

The leader may require revised evidence, set appraisal standards and recommend whether cases proceed to committee. Investment approval, acquisition commitments and regulated entity capital decisions remain with designated authorities. The role must avoid treating a shared-benefit claim as a substitute for an accountable delivery owner. Recommendations should distinguish a valuable strategic option from a full-scale investment whose evidence does not yet support the proposed commitment.

The permanent remit extends beyond initial approval to whether the promised economic logic remains credible after spending begins. Review should reveal why assumptions changed and what the portfolio should do next, not merely defend the original case. Legal diligence, independent risk sign-off and operational execution are excluded. The SVP will integrate their evidence into a clear recommendation while preserving the difference between financial appraisal and specialist assurance.

What you will own

• Define investment appraisal standards that reconcile business-unit forecasts with funding, operating capacity and specialist constraints, preventing inconsistent return calculations from deciding which proposal receives group attention.
• Recommend a capital allocation sequence under constrained resources, showing the opportunity cost of each commitment and the conditions that could justify a staged rather than immediate full investment.
• Challenge shared-benefit claims through named delivery owners and measurable dependencies, distinguishing benefits already included elsewhere from genuinely incremental value attributable to the proposal under review.
• Build committee papers that compare proceed, defer and decline options with explicit downside assumptions, making strategic rationale and financial uncertainty visible without converting every unknown into a misleading precise estimate.
• Establish post-investment reviews that revisit the original economic logic, identifying whether changed outcomes require corrective action, revised allocation or a different standard for future cases.
• Lead appraisal specialists toward independent judgement and reliable evidence management, ensuring that business sponsors can challenge calculations while neither hierarchy nor enthusiasm substitutes for a defensible investment recommendation.

Candidate qualifications

• Bring a 12–18-year career in financial-services strategic finance, portfolio strategy or business planning with direct involvement in capital allocation. Show a case where you recommended staging or declining an investment and explain the alternatives the committee considered. The requirement is personal judgement in a consequential decision, not participation in a successful transaction or ownership of its financial model alone.
• Demonstrate investment appraisal, scenario analysis and opportunity-cost reasoning. You must explain how you identified duplicated benefits, constrained resources or assumptions that depended on another programme. Strong finance education should underpin the work; a particular deal credential is not compulsory, but you must know when independent risk, legal or technical evidence is necessary before a recommendation can be responsibly made.
• Have influenced senior sponsors without losing analytical independence. Evidence should include a proposal whose strategic story was compelling but whose execution or economic assumptions required revision. Selection will examine how you communicated the weakness, preserved a constructive decision process and documented the conditions under which your recommendation would change as further evidence became available.
• Show leadership of investment or strategy analysts, with review discipline and clear committee writing. Experience following investments after approval is important: you should be able to describe how you compared actual outcomes with original assumptions and changed future allocation practice. The role requires intellectual honesty about uncertainty and the ability to separate appraisal accountability from the operational authority held by programme owners.

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 10 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-107.