Senior Specialist, Financial & Data Analytics in London

The Senior Specialist, Internal Audit – Financial & Data Analytics plays a critical role in delivering high value, data driven internal audit and advisory engagements. This role is heavily focused on financial analysis, performance insights, and advanced data analytics, integrating FP&A skillsets into internal audit work to enhance risk coverage, anomaly detection, and business insight. The role partners closely with Finance, FP&A, and business stakeholders to evaluate financial integrity, forecasting accuracy, management reporting, and key financial risks through analytics enabled audit techniques.

Key Responsibilities

• Financial & FP&A Focused Audit Execution
  • Lead and perform financial centric internal audits covering:
  • Financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes
  • Management reporting and key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • Cost structures, margin analysis, and profitability drivers
  • Revenue, expense, and working capital trends
  • Evaluate the accuracy, completeness, and reasonableness of financial models, assumptions, and forecasts.
  • Assess governance and controls over financial analysis, variance analysis, and performance tracking.
• Data Analytics & Continuous Risk Assessment
  • Contribute to the development and maintenance of databases and data pipelines to ensure data quality and accessibility for analysis.
  • Extract data from various sources (databases, APIs, web scraping, etc.), clean it, and transform it into a usable format.
  • Design and execute data driven audit procedures using advanced analytics to identify anomalies, trends, and outliers in large financial datasets.
  • Perform end to end population testing rather than sample based testing.
  • Support continuous auditing and monitoring initiatives.
  • Build and maintain repeatable analytics scripts and audit routines.
  • Predictive Modelling: Building ML models to forecast future outcomes based on historical data.
  • Create dashboards to aid in continuous monitoring efforts or present audit findings.
  • Collaborate with stakeholders to translate audit objectives into data questions and analytical approaches.
• Internal Audit & Risk Advisory
  • Lead or supervise audit engagements from planning through reporting, including:
  • Risk assessment and scoping
  • Audit program design with a strong analytics component
  • Results communication and issue validation
  • Provide forward looking insights beyond control gaps, highlighting process inefficiencies, financial risks and opportunities, and data quality or reporting reliability issues.
  • Support ad hoc management and Board level requests involving financial analysis.
• Stakeholder Management & Collaboration
  • Act as a trusted partner to Finance, FP&A, and business teams.
  • Present audit findings and analytical insights clearly to senior management.
• Process Improvement & Innovation
  • Drive the integration of advanced analytics and automation into internal audit methodology.
  • Identify opportunities to improve financial controls through data insights and enhance audit efficiency through scripting and visualization.
  • Stay current on data analytics tools, finance transformation trends, and audit innovation.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Education & Certifications
  • Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, Business Analytics, Economics, or related field.
  • Professional qualifications preferred, such as: CPA / CA, CFA (or partial completion), CISA (analytics heavy roles).
• Experience
  • 4–7 years of experience in internal audit, external audit, FP&A, or financial analysis.
  • Demonstrated experience in financial planning, forecasting, and performance analysis.
  • Hands on experience applying data analytics in audit or finance roles.
  • Prior experience supervising or mentoring junior team members is preferred.
• Technical & Analytics Skills
  • Strong understanding of financial statements and management reporting, budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis, internal controls and risk management frameworks.
  • Advanced proficiency in one or more of the following: SQL, Power BI (DAX and Power Query) / Tableau, Python / R (for Machine Learning and advance statistical analysis), Advanced Excel (Power Query, Power Pivot, VBA).
  • Experience working with large ERP datasets (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Teradata), Snowflake, financial and planning systems.

Key Competencies

• Strong analytical mindset with attention to detail.
• Ability to translate complex data into clear business insights.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Proactive, curious, and comfortable challenging assumptions.
• Ability to balance audit rigor with commercial awareness.

Why Join This Role

• Exposure to finance leadership and strategic decision making.
• Opportunity to shape the future of analytics driven internal audit.
• Blend of assurance and value adding advisory work.
• Continuous learning across data, finance, and audit disciplines.