Role Overview
The Program Manager – Finance Transformation leads and owns the end-to-end Finance Transformation Program (Finance TOM), acting as a strategic partner to the CFO, CIO, and Transformation Office. The role goes beyond project delivery and requires full program ownership across roadmap, governance, execution, and financial control, combined with deep finance expertise, strong ERP and systems leadership, and executive-level stakeholder management. The Program Manager is accountable for transforming finance operations into a scalable, controlled, and data-driven model, ensuring alignment between business, finance, and IT.
Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities
- Roadmap & Strategy: Define and own the Finance TOM roadmap across 6-month, 3-year, and 5-year horizons. Translate business priorities into a structured program execution plan aligned with finance strategy, IT architecture, and business objectives.
- Governance & Reporting: Establish and run a strong governance framework including SteerCo, weekly program cadences, and decision forums. Ensure agendas are shared in advance, decisions are documented, actions are tracked, and governance discipline is maintained. Provide a single source of truth for program status with two-layer reporting at project and program level.
- Executive Communication: Communicate progress versus plan, key risks, red flags, and decisions required to C-level stakeholders in a clear and concise manner.
- Financial Control: Own full program financials including CAPEX, OPEX, vendor management, and cost optimization. Drive cost control discipline and ensure transparency on budget, spend, risks, and mitigation actions.
- Stakeholder Engagement: Act as a trusted partner to Finance leadership and drive stakeholder alignment, business engagement, and adoption of solutions across regions.
- ERP & System Delivery: Supervise delivery across ERP deployment, integrations, testing, and go-live readiness, ensuring strong planning, scenario coverage, and issue resolution ownership.
- Team Leadership: Lead the program organization including project managers, functional leads, and external partners; define roles and responsibilities; and build a high-performance team.
Qualifications & Competencies
- Education: Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Business Administration, or a related field. MBA or relevant certification is a plus.
- Experience:
- Minimum 15+ years overall professional experience.
- Minimum 10+ years in Finance, including controlling, treasury, accounting, or financial operations.
- 8–10 years in program or transformation management.
- Proven experience leading large-scale ERP transformations and multi-country rollouts.
- Demonstrated ability to challenge finance design and define target operating models and core processes.
Technical & Core Competencies
- Strategic Leadership: Defines and drives the finance transformation roadmap with long-term vision and execution discipline.
- Finance Mastery: Deep understanding of finance operations including close, controlling, FP&A, and treasury.
- Program Governance: Builds and enforces program structure, governance, risk, and dependency management.
- Executive Communication: Communicates clearly, concisely, and in a decision-oriented manner with senior stakeholders.
- Stakeholder Management: Influences and aligns CFO, CIO, finance leaders, IT leaders, and business stakeholders across regions.
- Delivery Excellence: Balances strategic oversight with hands-on program execution and issue resolution.
- Financial Control: Owns budget visibility, cost discipline, vendor oversight, and value realization.
- ERP Competences: Strong hands-on experience in SAP S/4HANA FI/CO is mandatory. Knowledge of SAP TMS is preferred. Exposure to expense tools such as Zoho or Concur is desirable. Experience with mobile money/payment ecosystems and integration architecture/middleware is highly valued.
- Languages: Perfect spoken English and the language of the area of operation (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese).
- Other: Willingness to travel internationally as required. Working knowledge of Jira and Smartsheet as management tools. Ability to operate autonomously in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment.
Key Expected Results
- 100% of the finance transformation program managed through a single source of truth.
- Weekly program-level reporting delivered consistently and actionable for executive stakeholders.
- Governance cadence fully implemented, including SteerCo, weekly reviews, and disciplined action tracking.
- High stakeholder satisfaction across CFO, CIO, Finance, and IT leadership.
- Projects delivered on time, on budget, and within scope with successful go-lives.
- Budget accuracy maintained with visibility on CAPEX, OPEX, and measurable vendor cost optimization.
- Clear Finance TOM roadmap adopted with measurable reduction of manual processes.
