Head of Finance Business Partnering

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Exciting opportunity to join the leading international multichannel retailer for sports fashion and outdoor brands JD Sports as a Head of Finance Business Partnering.

Reporting to the Group Commercial Finance Director, this role will lead a team of functional finance business partners to develop and deliver high quality business partnering and decision support to encompass financial planning, reporting analysis, operating and capital investment appraisal and tracking.

This newly created, highly varied and intellectually challenging role provides an excellent opportunity to be part of a fast-growing and highly dynamic group, operating at a senior level with significant exposure to the Executive Board, and with ongoing development opportunities for the right candidate.

• Job Title - Head of Finance Business Partnering

• Location - JD Sports Head Office (BL9 8RR)

• Working rota - Mon-Fri

• Working hours - Full time

What You'll Be Doing:

As a Head of Finance Business Partnering, you'll be doing the following:

• Assimilating financial and non-financial insights needed to monitor and underpin short, medium and long term functional performance and strategic decision making.
• Delivering consistency in business partnering and investment decision making across the group.
• Initiate and lead ad-hoc analysis of cross-functional business unit projects including making recommendations on project prioritisation.
• Leading existing Business Partners across Property, People, Brand (plus Technology and Marketing subject to reorg) - creating an environment to build capability and create a forum to share best practice and drive consistency.
• Forge strong relationships with Functional leads and create a culture where finance partners are trusted and relied upon to provide valuable counsel and support, whist always acting objectively and ensuring group goals are prioritised.
• Ensuring all in-flight UK and Europe-led group strategic initiatives have a clear business case with defined financial and non-financial KPI's that can be tracked.
• Work with Transformation team to provide, and continue to evolve, consistent project and investment appraisal documentation.
• Challenging functional spend to ensure demonstrable returns on investment.
• Coordination with Group Procurement teams to ensure that significant areas of third party spend are regularly benchmarked and renegotiated with negotiated savings factored into forecasts, budgets and long-term planning.
• Ensuring join-up between Brand, Merchandising and Finance teams with clarity on terms for top brands and clear line of sight on changes to terms and their impacts on EPOS and non-EPOS margins in forecasts and budgets.
• Work with functional leads to identify and realise performance improvements - including to highlight sales opportunities, areas of margin erosion and potential cost efficiencies.
• Ensuring functional strategies are robust with a clearly defined business case and ability to track post appraisal delivery.
• Support preparation of functional budgets and reforecasts with clarity on drivers for change and emphasis on KPI's. Encouraging a 'zero-based' budgeting approach.
• Ongoing monitoring of functional performance and spend, including development and tracking of KPI's, working capital, financial exposure, risk and opportunities - holding teams to account.
• Sharing approach on monitoring, tracking and KPI's with other regional finance teams to build consistency in approach.

What We're Looking For:

• A qualified accountant (ACA, CIMA or ACCA) with significant and demonstrable post qualification experience
• Significant commercial and strategic exposure with evidence of positively impacting business performance, ideally within a consumer-focused business (e.g. retail/ FMCG/ leisure)
• Been involved in strategy formation and monitoring
• Accustomed to leading financial planning, monitoring and business partnering in a large and complex business, encompassing multiple business units and territories

The Company:

The JD Group is a leading omnichannel retailer of Sports Fashion, Street & Premium Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms with over 60,000 colleagues over 3,400 stores across several retail fascia's in over 30 markets around the world.

We are an equal opportunities employer who embraces and values differences. We recognise the importance of an inclusive workplace culture in which everyone can thrive irrespective of their background or identity.

To be a part of this successful and continuously growing company, you will have the desire to ingrain our strategic goals of being a people first, a digital leader and customer focused organisation which provides operational excellence and is continuous with identifying new areas of growth into our day-to-day.

We know our employees work tirelessly to make JD Sports the success it is today and in turn, we offer them some amazing benefits:

• Incremental Holiday Allowance
• Staff Discount on qualifying purchases across Group retail stores and online
• Exclusive Colleague Bike Discount scheme
• Discounted Gym membership
• Personal development opportunities to learn and develop at work
• Access to Apprenticeships and accredited qualifications

Interested?

If you are interested in this position, then press the Apply Now button.

Due to the high volumes of applications our opportunities attract, it takes time to review them all. If you don't hear back within two weeks of your application, please consider your application to have been unsuccessful on this occasion

Applications that meet the skills criteria will be contacted for a 1st stage meeting with the talent team. Shortlisted candidates will then be invited to interview with the hiring manager.

Thank you again for your time.

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