Group Corporate Finance Director in London

About Equals

Equals is the next-generation global money movement platform built for exceptional businesses operating across borders. We bring international payments, embedded finance, and more together into a single connection that simplifies operations and strengthens financial control. With deep expertise and integrated infrastructure, Equals turns financial complexity into reliable solutions.

With our headquarters in London and teams around the UK and Europe, you will join a very close-knit, talented and supportive team from various backgrounds who believe that bringing different perspectives together helps us understand our customers' needs. United, by one thing, making money management straightforward and cost-effective for our customers.

About the role

Equals Money is a fast-growing, regulated payments business on a mission to make money movement simple. As Group Corporate Finance Director you lead the financial planning, analysis and insight activities for the group - management accounts insight and analysis, Executive and Board reporting, shareholder communications, bank packs, budgeting and forecasting, rolling financial outturn, five-year business plan modelling, financial data integrity and business partnering across the group.

You also lead Finance Projects, including M&A support, debt financing support and the continuous improvement of finance function processes, controls and outputs. The role combines day-to-day commercial finance excellence with the delivery of the strategic finance projects that support the group's growth ambitions.

Above all, you keep the group Deal Ready. Three years of history and five years of forecast - P&L, balance sheet and cashflow, fully integrated and reconciled to the published monthly management accounts and the annual statutory accounts of the Alakazam Group - available on demand, rather than assembled in a rush once a transaction has already started.

Reporting to the Chief Financial Officer, this is a senior leadership role for a qualified accountant who is equally credible in a Board meeting, a lender meeting and a diligence data room.

Responsibilities

Always Deal Ready

• Keep the Alakazam Group Deal Ready at all times - three years back and five years forward, P&L, balance sheet and cashflow, fully integrated and reconciled to the published monthly management accounts and to the annual statutory accounts.
• Maintain an ever-ready, print-ready data room, so that a transaction begins from a position of readiness rather than a scramble to assemble.
• Work with the Head of Management Accounting and the Head of Financial Reporting so that deal readiness falls out of business as usual, rather than becoming a separate exercise every time it is needed.
• Ensure normalised trading is separated from one-off items at general ledger level, so that adjusted earnings can be evidenced to a buyer, a lender or an auditor rather than argued.

One Integrated Model

• Own the five-year business plan modelling, developing and maintaining integrated financial models that support long-range strategic planning.
• Run one single, fully integrated group model - P&L, balance sheet and cashflow, with double-entry integrity and built-in checks - used for the budget, the reforecast, the long-range plan, lender reporting and every transaction, rather than a proliferation of separate spreadsheets that cannot be reconciled to each other.
• Run scenarios and stress tests off that one model, so that every version of the future is internally consistent and the difference between them can be explained.
• Model at group and at regulated entity level, so that regulatory capital, safeguarding and distributable reserves are visible in the plan rather than discovered afterwards.

Planning, Forecasting and Reporting

• Lead the group budgeting and forecasting cycles, delivering accurate financial projections aligned with strategic objectives.
• Maintain and deliver a rolling financial outturn, providing the business with a continuously updated view of expected full-year performance.
• Own the preparation and delivery of Board packs, ensuring financial content is accurate, insightful and presented to the highest standard.
• Produce high-quality Executive insight and analysis, translating complex financial data into actionable narratives for the Executive Committee.
• Deliver management accounts insight and analysis, providing clear commentary on performance, trends and variances to support executive decision-making.
• Work with the Head of Management Accounting to load the budget and the latest forecast into the general ledger, including the roll-up account structure needed to compare detailed actuals against budgets set at a higher level, so that there is one source of truth rather than a reconciliation between spreadsheets.
• Deliver insight, not commentary. “Numbers are up and numbers are down” is not analysis - every pack should say what changed, why, what it means, and what we should do about it.

Data, KPIs and Insight

• Work in close partnership with the Data team to ensure the integrity of all financial information held in the data warehouse - no financial figure is published to the business until Finance has approved it and reconciled it to the general ledger.
• Own the definition and the calculation of the group's key finance KPIs, so that there is one agreed definition of each measure and one number for it, wherever in the business it is quoted.
• Maintain the group's KPI framework and the management information packs built on it, keeping both aligned to how the business is actually run and to what the Board, shareholders and lenders measure us on.
• Deliver financial insight through drill-down visualisation tools and dashboards, so that Executives, Board members and cost centre owners can move from a headline number to the underlying detail themselves, rather than raising a request with Finance and waiting.
• Work with the Data and Engineering teams on the data model, feeds and definitions that make self-service reporting reliable, and keep finance and non-finance data consistent where the two meet.

Capital Raising, M&A and Value Creation

• Provide financial analysis and due diligence support for M&A transactions, from initial screening through to post-acquisition integration, ensuring the CFO, Board and shareholders are fully informed.
• Support debt raising and refinancing activities, including preparation of lender information packs, financial models and ongoing lender relationship management.
• Model target businesses and the combined group on acquisition, including synergies, integration costs and funding structure, together with the regulatory capital, treasury and safeguarding implications of the resulting structure.
• Build the business case for every material investment - organic growth, internationalisation, product and system investment - to a consistent standard of NPV, IRR, payback and breakeven, and track the benefits actually realised after the decision is made.
• Quantify how Finance itself creates shareholder value: the cost of capital raised, cash released from working capital, regulatory capital efficiency, cost control, and the margin impact of pricing and revenue initiatives.

The External Story

• Own the preparation and delivery of bank packs, ensuring debt providers receive timely, accurate and comprehensive financial reporting.
• Prepare and deliver shareholder insight and analysis, ensuring investors receive timely, accurate and compelling financial information.
• Own debt covenant compliance forecasting, monitoring and reporting, ensuring the group maintains headroom against all financial covenants and that debt providers receive timely and accurate information.
• Test covenant and regulatory capital headroom on the forecast as well as on the actuals, and flag any pressure more than twelve months before it would arise, with the mitigating actions available at each point.
• Tell one consistent financial story to every external audience - shareholders, lending banks, counterparty banks, insurers, regulators and auditors - at both group and regulated entity level.
• Provide the forward-looking financial evidence behind going concern, viability and impairment, working with the Head of Financial Reporting.

Finance Projects and Change

• Lead finance transformation and continuous improvement initiatives, including enhancements to finance function processes, controls and outputs.
• Deliver system implementations, process re-engineering and operating model changes within the finance function.
• Own the Finance change portfolio through the Head of Finance Projects, ensuring it is prioritised, resourced and sequenced around the close, the audit and the regulatory calendar so that delivery does not compete with business as usual.
• Hold every project to a business case and to the benefits it promised, with a post-implementation review that tests whether those benefits were actually delivered.
• Sponsor the adoption of automation and agentic AI across Finance while insisting that human review and approval remain firmly in place - the machine can prepare the answer, but a person still has to understand it and own it.

Business Partnering and Team Leadership

• Act as a finance business partner across the group, providing commercial teams with financial analysis that drives revenue growth and margin improvement.
• Lead, develop and hold accountable the Head of FP&A and the Head of Finance Projects and their teams, setting clear expectations on quality, pace and ownership.
• Get Finance into the conversation before the decision is taken rather than reporting on it afterwards, with cost centre owners and commercial leaders alike.
• Act as a visible senior leader across the whole Finance function, not only your own teams, contributing to its development and improvement beyond your own remit.

Key relationships

Internally, you will work most closely with the Chief Financial Officer and the Group Finance Director, and with your own leadership team - the Head of FP&A and the Head of Finance Projects. You will depend on the Head of Management Accounting for the close and the ledger, the Head of Financial Reporting for statutory accounts, tax and technical positions, the Directors of Financial Control for regulated entity reporting and regulatory capital, and the Group Treasurer for cash, liquidity and counterparty exposures.

Beyond Finance, you will partner with the Chief Executive and the executive team, with Commercial, Product and Operations on business cases and growth initiatives, and with Engineering and Data on the financial data that feeds the warehouse. You will work with Compliance, Risk and Legal wherever transactions or plans touch regulated entities.

Externally, you will hold the day-to-day financial relationships with the group's shareholders and its lending banks, and with the corporate finance, legal and diligence advisors engaged on transactions.

Your Profile

Skills & Experience

• Qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA or CIMA) or equivalent, with significant post-qualification experience in FP&A or corporate finance.
• Proven track record of delivering high-quality management accounts insight, Board packs, bank packs and shareholder reporting.
• Strong experience in budgeting, forecasting, rolling outturn and long-range business plan modelling.
• Strong financial modelling skills, including advanced Excel, with experience building integrated three-statement models and scenario analysis.
• Experience leading finance projects, including M&A support, debt financing support and process improvement initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to produce and present clear, compelling financial insight to Executive Committees, Boards, shareholders and debt providers.
• Experience working in a private equity-backed or publicly listed environment.
• Experience ensuring financial data integrity across reporting systems and data warehouses.
• Experience of implementing Power BI or other data visualisation software to enhance financial reporting and insight.
• Experience of defining a group KPI framework and holding a single agreed definition of each measure across a business, rather than allowing several versions of the same metric to circulate.
• Strong business partnering skills, with the ability to influence commercial decision-making.
• Experience of preparing a business for diligence, and a realistic understanding of what a data room has to withstand.
• Experience of leading senior finance managers, not only analysts.
• Experience in payments, e-money or financial services is highly desirable, as is familiarity with FCA compliance frameworks and regulatory reporting for authorised payment institutions.
• Prior experience in investment banking, corporate finance advisory or Big Four transaction services, and of post-merger integration planning and execution, would be an advantage.

Attitude & Behaviours

• Deal-ready by instinct - you keep the group in a state where a transaction could start tomorrow, rather than treating readiness as a project to be run when one does.
• Insight, not commentary - you tell people what the numbers mean and what to do about them, not simply which way they moved.
• Numerate and sceptical - you interrogate your own model as hard as you would interrogate someone else's.
• Credible under external scrutiny - equally comfortable in front of the Board, a lending bank, a shareholder and a diligence team.
• Commercially engaged - you understand the business that generates the numbers, and you are in the conversation before the decision is made.
• A developer of people - you set clear standards, delegate properly, and build capability beneath you.

Diversity & inclusion

Equals is committed to building a workplace where everyone can be themselves. We actively welcome different perspectives, backgrounds and experiences, and we'll work with you to understand what you need to do your best work. We're an equal opportunities employer and proud of it.

This role requires a minimum of four days per week on site at our London office.