Senior Vice President, Banking Service Cost Attribution

The mandate

A banking services organisation provides global operations, technology support and control services whose costs are charged to several business beneficiaries. The service catalogue has not kept pace with consumption, leaving businesses unable to distinguish a charge caused by their demand from a share of inherited capacity. This Senior Vice President establishes transparent financial attribution and a credible route for resolving the resulting disputes.

The permanent appointment is open-ended, with an eighteen-month initial agenda covering cost-pool definitions, beneficiary drivers and service finance governance. Early work reconciles the catalogue to actual operating responsibilities and expenditure. Later stages establish controlled changes when demand, service design or capacity shifts, so a chargeback method does not remain fixed simply because its historical formula is convenient for the supplying function.

Attribution must make an economic distinction between consumption, readiness and idle capacity. Some services incur costs to remain available regardless of transaction volume; others respond to identifiable business demand. Treating both through a volume driver can conceal the reason expenditure persists when activity falls. The leader will ensure businesses understand those differences and can challenge a cost without assuming every fixed service commitment should disappear immediately.

The Senior Vice President controls internal service attribution standards and dispute recommendations within the approved management finance framework. Material changes to beneficiary commitments or enterprise cost policy require executive approval. Controllers retain the financial books and accounting treatment; qualified tax owners retain transfer-pricing policy and jurisdictional advice. This is management service economics, not a mandate to determine tax positions or turn an internal allocation into an unauthorised legal intercompany charge.

At twelve months, material service charges should be traceable from cost pools through approved drivers to the beneficiaries receiving them. By eighteen months, consumption changes and capacity choices should enter an explicit review process, with unresolved disputes and accepted exceptions visible to leadership. The continuing role maintains that discipline as shared services evolve, enabling informed business decisions rather than merely redistributing the same expenditure through a more elaborate spreadsheet.

What you will own

• Establish a service catalogue that connects operating capability, cost-pool ownership and beneficiary demand, exposing services whose description no longer matches the expenditure being attributed to businesses.
• Decide the evidence standard for beneficiary drivers, testing whether transaction volume, reserved capacity or another observable measure explains cost consumption before recommending a chargeback method for approval.
• Reconcile cost pools to controller-approved records, preserving a clear bridge between management attribution and the financial books so an analytical redistribution does not silently alter accounting responsibilities.
• Develop idle-capacity and readiness-cost views that distinguish avoidable surplus from authorised resilience commitments, enabling executives to make capacity choices without forcing their costs into an unrelated beneficiary's demand measure.
• Govern allocation dispute reviews through source evidence and documented principles, requiring both supplying functions and consuming businesses to substantiate their positions rather than resolve every challenge through negotiation alone.
• Build consumption-change review packs that explain the effect of new services, reduced activity or altered support requirements, making commitment changes visible before they become an unexplained variation in business budgets.
• Develop service finance leaders capable of applying attribution principles consistently, coordinating with controllers and tax specialists while retaining explicit boundaries between internal economics, book entries and transfer-pricing policy.

Candidate qualifications

• Significant enterprise FP&A, banking business-services finance or cost-attribution leadership is required, with personally evidenced work across multiple service beneficiaries. Describe a charge you rebuilt because its driver no longer reflected consumption, the operating records inspected and the executive decision needed. Consolidating allocated totals without understanding their economic cause will not establish the judgement expected here.
• Applicants must understand cost-pool design, fixed versus demand-linked service commitments and the treatment of unused capacity. Show how you distinguished an avoidable surplus from an authorised readiness requirement and explained the consequence to consuming businesses. The relevant proof is transparent decision support, not simply producing a different distribution that made a disputed business budget appear more favourable.
• Strong reconciliation and governance habits should include a documented bridge to the financial books and coordination with specialist tax owners. Explain how you kept management attribution separate from legal intercompany charges or transfer-pricing policy. Analytical or visualisation tools may support the work, but controlled definitions, source evidence and explicit approval boundaries must remain understandable without the original modeller.
• The role requires leadership of experienced service finance partners and constructive adjudication between supplying functions and business executives. Provide an allocation dispute where you rejected an unsupported position, preserved the relationship and made the unresolved trade-off visible. Experience should demonstrate durable principles, practitioner development and willingness to escalate material policy questions rather than accept compromise solely to close the discussion.

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 15 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-184.