Financial Decision Support

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time.

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

Job Description

Commercial Finance Execution Accountabilities

• Serve as a subject matter expert on financial data integrity, accounting processes, reconciliations’, analysis and reporting for end-to-end Financial Management in business area.
• Develop and sustain knowledge and experience on the end to end processes, including relevant systems within scope of work.
• Know BU financial ambitions and balance sheet aspirations of RBB in performance reporting.
• Ensure that the CFO is appraised of key financial issues that need to be raised with executive leadership to enable integrity and timely management the BU.
• Transform and evolve Finance planning, tracking and control processes.
• Contribute to the effectiveness of the core finance processes for RBB Finance (annual planning, forecasting, spend trajectory and reporting).
• Understand and integrate Treasury, Risk, and Finance data from a BU perspective, where appropriate.
• Responsible for continuous operational excellence and real-time responsiveness of finance to enable business to achieve growth and profitability objectives.
• Focus on information-driven performance improvement and formulate data into easy access standardised views.
• Prepare for all cycles in advance and ensure adequate engagement with the relevant finance and business teams.
• Create unprecedented, seamless customer experiences via finance BU enablement.
• Embrace our distinctive brand aspiration and infuse in business.
• Identify and innovate operating practices to optimize the function. Embrace digital solutions.
• Drive continuous process efficiency, financial rigor and controls. 
• Adopt what’s ‘best for absa’ approach in finance practices.
• Have a holistic eco-system view of business, that is, geography, customer, channel and product in developing information views of business.
• Book of work contribution: Build innovative finance business case financial information, insights and benefits tracking’s’ solutions to continuously inform management decisions.
• Influence the build of a leading global payments hub, where applicable.
• Maintain stewardship and excellence which drives performance and sustainable growth through preservation of financial integrity.
• Be an active force for good in society through business execution.
• Contribute to BCM & cybersecurity processes relevant to the BU and finance execution.

Financial Reporting Accountabilities

• Prepare and coordinate the preparation of management reports, monthly scorecards, sales reports, special data analysis, and ad-hoc information reports to enable decision making
• Submit financial reports to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Business unit head, Cluster Finance and the Group Finance Team on or before the agreed deadline
• Ensure appropriate, quality and timeous delivery of accurate financial and non-financial management information to support business objectives and expectations, including appropriate financial and non-financial metrics, valid and insightful comments and packaging the information in a relevant and appropriate manner.
• Analyse financial results on a monthly basis and summarise them so as to enable the Business unit Management Team take timely and appropriate actions. Highlight variances from the business plan and provide explanatory notes for those variances
• Coordinate the preparation of budgets and variance reports by business units and ensure that Business managers are engaged within agreed timeframes
• Sign off and discuss the monthly short term plan (STP), medium term plan (MTP) and rolling forecast (RAF) and budgets with the relevant stakeholders to enable consolidation into the Cluster forecast and budget.
• Ensure "one version of the truth" for all reporting and that management reporting reconciles/agrees to reports produced within other areas of the business
• Build trust in the Group finance and country finance function through the creation of a single source of financial information which is corroborated by related management information sources and alignment to the agreed accounting principles, methodologies, and underlying data are correctly applied.
• Generate innovative easy to comprehend progress reports for Exco, countries and various stakeholders on their strategic agenda, short-term and long-term plans. This will assist them to track against their investments, operational success metrics, efficiencies, risks and mitigations.
• Own the process of delivery of high-quality information for regular and ad-hoc enhanced reporting to agreed requirements, timelines, and standards. This will include consolidated country reporting, product reporting, margin analysis, various key metrics.
• Suggest solutions to enhance cost effectiveness and operating efficiency of the business unit. Ensure that all action plans that have been agreed to are documented and assigned to the relevant owners and that the financial impact as regards the implementation is monitored.
• Act in line with the correct governance and control frameworks across the Finance team, as well as for proactively addressing any deficiencies and exceptions.
• Take a commercial view on business and provide contextual insights into performance reports. Provide insights across the markets and products. Provide management with key finance and strategic insights which can assist in driving management decisions
• Generate finance narratives and insights driving business and country performance; and build pioneering new propositions.
• Deliver reporting reflecting deep commercial, holistic understanding, coherency, clarity, and contextualisation.
• Provide thought-leadership, insight, influence and challenge on evolving stakeholder information requirements and reporting processes to deliver analytics.
• Align to processes around month-end, year-end and planning cycles across the RBB finance community and BU based on the requirements from Group. Prepare for all cycles in advance and ensure adequate engagement with the relevant finance and BU teams.
• Manage the production of regular, high quality, standardised financial and non-financial reporting and analytics to Business and Finance; and focus on effective collaborative stakeholder hand-offs in the production.
• Develop and implement control procedures as deficiencies or exceptions are identified which support the production of error-free reports. Assess and drive improvement of automation of business & country accounting practices and policies.

Stakeholder engagement

• Provide advice and support to the CFO, Country teams on financial risks and control matters that may have an impact on profitability
• Interact with the stakeholders to agree minimum quality standards, as well as an agreed method of communicating and resolving any identified quality deficiencies in the reporting process to have a clear understanding of the business
• Develop a good understanding of key value drivers to advice business on appropriate intervention strategies to meet targets
• Communicate financial policies, procedures, standards and guidelines to the business unit management team.
• Support projects by developing the financial component of the business cases that are created by the management Team to actively track and change benefits and costs of the project.
• Provide strong support to the operational team by having regular meetings with them to share financial performance

Financial Modelling

• Create excel based financial models or utilise tools available for all financial reporting requirements and build a data base of accurate financial and non-financial information which can be used to extract historical financial information
• Extract financial and all applicable information from various sources, for example, the General Ledger (GL)
• Support the Management Team to understand their financial and management accounts, expenditure allocation, transfer pricing on their profit and loss accounts and how to conduct financial planning and forecasting
• Integrate advanced modelling and analysis capability to provide actionable intelligence, beyond data within the function

People Investment Accountabilities

• Peer responsibility: Coach, inspire, engage, mentor and develop finance and business savvy leaders.
• Network with finance colleagues across Countries and GFD and create awareness of challenges, opportunities and issues and encourage collaboration
• Focus on Finance skills evolution and remaining relevant.
• Embrace the value of finance partnership in Big Data, Advanced Analytics, mergers and acquisitions, and partnerships into the core of our business.
• Ensure deep personal understanding of income statement, balance sheet, margin returns, variance analysis, capital and liquidity requirements, revenues, assets, liabilities and capital, expenses, headcount analytics and other key ratios through relevant business engagement.

Role / Person Specification

• Minimum B-degree (NQF level no.7) Desired Post Graduate Degree (NQF level no.8+), CA (SA) or CIMA or MBA qualification preferred.
• 3+ years professional financial management experience
• 2+ years Banking Experience at a management level
• Knowledge and skills:
• Experience in executing finance processes.
• Experience in commercial innovation environments
• Broad Finance including strategic, commercial, legal, risk and operational aspects
• Understanding of the financial services sector within a professional business environment
• Knowledge of building collaborative work environments

Education

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised