The mandate
A mid-market digital and AI services group has brought four operating businesses under common ownership while retaining their distinct delivery propositions. Finance now needs to move beyond transaction accounting and local performance reports into accountable group decisions about capital, liquidity and acquisition returns. The Group CFO leads that next stage, maintaining operating visibility without forcing every business into the same commercial model.
The appointment is permanent and open-ended, with a twenty-four-month initial agenda to integrate financial governance and strengthen portfolio investment choices. Local finance leaders remain responsible for business control and delivery partnership. The group role owns consolidated financial integrity, financing strategy and the evidence through which directors assess whether the acquired portfolio is creating value rather than merely adding revenue.
Digital services margins can be distorted by transition effort, shared platforms and uneven treatment of product development costs. Acquisition cases also contain synergy assumptions that may not belong in operating forecasts until their conditions are met. The CFO will preserve a clear bridge from original investment expectations to current business evidence, so neither accounting presentation nor optimistic integration claims substitute for realised financial progress.
The executive controls group finance, cash management and investment recommendation standards within the approved delegation. New acquisitions, material equity or debt issuance and changes to group capital policy require board approval. Product strategy, legal transaction terms and technology architecture remain with their accountable leaders. Finance must challenge their economic implications without claiming that financial ownership alone confers authority over their specialist decisions.
The first year should produce reliable consolidation, visible liquidity dependencies and an acquisition performance record that withstands investor challenge. During the second year, the group should make funding choices through explicit alternatives and build succession in its entity finance teams. These are early performance milestones for a continuing executive seat, whose accountability evolves with the portfolio rather than ending when integration reporting is complete.
What you will own
- Establish a consolidated financial governance calendar that reconciles entity close, liquidity review and investment decisions, making business-specific risks visible without obscuring them through aggregate group performance.
- Decide the standards for acquisition return tracking, separating original underwriting assumptions, approved integration actions and observed outcomes so directors can judge progress without retrospective rewriting of the investment case.
- Develop group funding alternatives that reflect operating cash conversion and legal entity constraints, showing which businesses can support shared commitments and where ring-fenced resources cannot be assumed available.
- Govern shared cost and platform investment treatment with documented economic rationale, preventing transfer choices from making one business appear successful at the expense of another's unsupported forecast burden.
- Build investor and board financial narratives that reconcile to approved records, preserving uncertainty around unproven synergies and product investments rather than converting a strategic ambition into reported performance.
- Lead entity finance talent and succession reviews, developing leaders capable of independent commercial challenge while setting group controls that do not eliminate useful local business accountability.
- Present capital deployment recommendations with credible alternatives and downside conditions, enabling the board to compare acquisition, organic investment and liquidity preservation choices against the same financial capacity view.
Candidate qualifications
- Demonstrate CFO leadership in digital, technology-enabled services or a relevant multi-business platform, with substantial exposure to acquisitions and group financial governance. Describe how you moved from entity finance accountability to portfolio decisions, identifying the liquidity, control or investment issue that could not be understood through a single operating company's reports.
- Bring strong technical accounting and financial control judgement supported by a recognised professional finance qualification. Relevant experience includes consolidation, financial reporting across differing standards and disciplined treatment of development or shared platform costs. Explain an accounting presentation that required a clearer economic bridge before directors could interpret the underlying business result accurately.
- Show direct involvement in debt or equity funding and acquisition diligence, with evidence of challenging assumptions rather than only assembling investor materials. Describe a synergy or growth claim you withheld from the operating forecast until conditions were met, how the investment case was tracked and what subsequent evidence changed the financial decision.
- Establish executive team leadership across entity CFOs, investors and operating leaders. Provide an example where group interests conflicted with a local financial objective and how you made the trade-off transparent through governance. The appointment requires sustained accountability, clear delegated decisions and the ability to build a finance leadership bench as the portfolio evolves.
