Director, Cost Management & Efficiency - CIB in Edinburgh

Locations: Edinburgh / Bristol / London

Hours: Full-Time

Working Pattern: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our office sites. Colleagues with disabilities can be supported with workplace adjustments including hybrid working expectations in line with our Flexibility Works policy.

About This Opportunity: We’re seeking a Director, Cost Management & Efficiency to play a key role in shaping how Corporate and Institutional Banking (CIB) delivers disciplined financial stewardship. This is a senior, high impact role with significant visibility across CIB, responsible for strengthening cost rigour, improving workforce and investment decisions and ensuring alignment to CIB’s North Star strategy. Working closely with CIB Finance and senior collaborators, you’ll provide executive level insight and leadership to support informed decision making and sustained efficiency outcomes.

About The Role: As the Director, you’ll oversee direct and indirect cost performance, workforce planning and investment evaluations within the Strategic Cost & Investment team. You’ll ensure disciplined financial management through robust FTE modelling, cost/benefit planning and business unit cost assessment. You’ll act as a key partner to CIB Finance and senior collaborators, aligning cost actions and investment decisions with strategic priorities. The role also provides clear governance, executive‐ready insights and leadership communication to enable timely decisions and the sustained delivery of savings and productivity improvements.

The role will have a focus on:

• Managing and maintaining a consolidated view of CIB direct and indirect costs, ensuring clear tracking against plan, forecast and outlook.
• Establishing and maintaining cost control routines: run‐rate monitoring, variance analysis, drivers, and corrective action planning.
• Partnering with Finance to ensure consistent treatment of costs, allocations/chargebacks, and standardised reporting definitions and methodologies.
• Leading identification of structural cost opportunities (vendor, discretionary, real estate, technology run, third‐party services), including scenario analysis and prioritisation.
• Leading workforce planning across CIB in partnership with HR and Finance, ensuring headcount/FTE plans align to strategy and capacity needs.
• Building and maintaining FTE models (run rate, hiring/attrition, redeployment, location mix, contractor vs. perm, spans/layers impacts where relevant).
• Transforming strategic plans into workforce demand and supply views, identifying risks, constraints and options (e.g., rebalancing, productivity levers, role rationalisation).
• Providing forward‐looking insight on workforce cost drivers (compensation, benefits, contractors, overtime, vacancies) and implications for budgets and targets.

What We Need From You:

• Senior cost and financial management expertise (5+ years) - Experience in cost management, financial stewardship, or investment governance within a large, complex organisation (financial services preferred), with a strong track record of applying financial discipline to improve cost, workforce and investment outcomes.
• Strong commercial and analytical judgement (5+ years) - Demonstrated experience applying commercial and financial judgement to complex cost and investment decisions, translating data, analysis and assumptions into clear options and recommendations for senior audiences.
• Senior partnering and influence - Proven ability to build credibility and effective working relationships with senior leaders across Finance, HR and the business, providing challenge, aligning priorities and influencing decisions without direct authority.
• Cost governance and control - Strong experience in cost governance, planning, tracking and reporting, with the ability to handle risks, dependencies and corrective actions through appropriate governance and executive forums.
• Workforce planning and FTE modelling capability - Experience leading workforce planning and FTE modelling activities, including run‐rate analysis, demand and supply modelling, scenario planning and evaluation of productivity and capacity options.
• Complex change and decision‐making in ambiguity - Experience operating in complex, evolving environments, making and standing behind decisions with incomplete information while sustaining progress across cross‐functional initiatives.

This Is A Place For You: Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion supporting our customers, colleagues and communities, and we’re committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop. We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer Initiative. We offer reasonable workplace adjustments for colleagues with disabilities, including flexibility in office attendance, location and working patterns. And, as a Disability Confident Leader, we guarantee interviews for a fair and proportionate number of applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role with a disability, long-term health or neurodivergent condition through the Disability Confident Scheme. We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers. Just let us know what you need.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual performance-related bonus
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days’ holiday