Low Carbon is building Finance Centres of Expertise (CoE) in London. These teams are being setup to house specialist skills, with effectively managed pooled resources that will support the whole of Low Carbon. The team will have deep knowledge of our business and sector to drive meaningful insights across the company.

The Head of Controllership CoE role is a leadership role, reporting into Director, Finance Operations and Control. The role has a range of responsibilities covering all aspects of controllership across Low Carbon.

This role works closely with internal teams including  Low Carbon Finance Services (LCFS), Group Finance, Low Carbon IT and Transformation, as well as managing external relationships with customers, auditors, and other third parties. The job holder will also be responsible for enabling the successful transition and stabilisation of activities into the new CoE working alongside transformation teams throughout the duration of the transformation programme and embedding the activities into business as usual.

• Lead the implementation of the Controllership CoE (CCoE), partnering with teams across Low Carbon
• Lead a team of Controllers and Financial Reporting Accountants, supporting them to load-balance work based on demand to ensure consistent, qualitative and timely delivery. The scope of their work includes:
  • Executing Low Carbon’s financial control strategy, ensuring compliance with key risk and control activities
  • Designing, standardising and optimising internal and external financial reporting (e.g. Investment Dashboard, Financial Statements and Statutory Reporting)
  • Managing the end-to-end intercompany accounting process, processing ad hoc and complex intercompany transactions, with the support of LCFS who will be in charge of regular intercompany transactions
  • Reviewing and reconciling financial close information when project moves from DevCo to OpCo
  • Period-end task management – to include tracking/ sequencing activity and optimising process and reviewing key outputs
  • Intercompany reconciliations, collect cash flow data
  • Responsible for implementing, executing and optimising accounting standards
  • USGAAP
• Lead the CoE to achieve its objectives, in line with the CoE vision and Group Controllership Strategy
• Being accountable for service excellence, developing and delivering timely outputs with high quality and addressing any control issues arising within the CoE in a timely manner
• Monitoring CoE KPIs, prioritising resource and workloads as required to ensure compliance with the CoE’s mandate
• Establishing and maintaining business continuity measures for the CCoE to ensure seamless service delivery, leveraging both site and technology plans
• Identifying and continually implementing opportunities to drive cost and operating efficiency across the CCoE, leading appropriate initiatives where required
• Developing and leading long term and short-term plans for the continuous development of the CCoE
• Regulatory Compliance and Reporting: Oversight of compliance with industry-specific regulations and standards, which may be particularly relevant in the energy sector.
• Risk Management and Mitigation: Responsibility for identifying financial risks, reporting to those responsible and suggesting controls to mitigate.
• Assess the strength or credibility of the 24-month forecast and review alternate outcomes through the evaluation of forecast assumptions.
• Develop an understanding of operational performance to the business, including drivers of differences between planned and actual performance

Person Specification

• Strong leader with a track record of managing high-performing teams
• Energetic, reliable, adaptable and used to using their initiative in a changing and flexible organisation.
• Provides thought leadership to shape future decisions
• Focuses on creating value for the business
• Clearly communicates the company missions and values
• Willingness to work flexibly across geographic time zones during peak periods such as period end

Skills & Experience

• Significant experience in controllership or related function (e.g. Record to Report)
• Experience in leading transformational type of projects (Ideally CoE set up; in house shared service setup and/or outsourcing experiences will be considered
• Experience leading leaders and teams
• Ability to motivate and inspire team members
• Ability to manage a number of activities with multiple stakeholders and follow through to the conclusion
• Ability to work effectively with senior management across all functional areas
• Excellent verbal / written communication and presentation skills
• Ability to analyse complex problems, identify proactive solutions and implement change in a team-oriented environment
• Detailed Financial data, systems, process and governance knowledge
• Proven ability to foster a culture of continuous improvement relating to processes and operational performance across organisations to deliver high levels of customer satisfaction