Director, Financial Planning & Analysis in Hampshire

NATS is the UK’s leading air navigation service provider, handling over 2.4 million flights each year. We provide air traffic control services from two control centres and at airports around the UK. We also provide a wide range of commercial products and solutions internationally. Our people are at the heart of our purpose to advance aviation and keep the skies safe.

Job Purpose: This is a key senior leadership role within Finance, responsible for implementing and managing the end-to-end process for all financial planning reporting and analysis across the NATS Group, which includes overseas entities and subsidiaries. You will deliver this from a centralised, on-demand service portal that makes use of new technology (such as Power BI and published dashboards) to provide a single reporting nexus of high fidelity reporting with topical, actionable insight to support decision making. This role is responsible for creating and managing the financial plan for the business (including, critically, the bids for regulatory price controls) and responding to analytical questions and requests on any financial or economic topic. You will also support delivery of the wider finance vision at NATS, which seeks to shape the future of aviation as a trusted business partner focussed on efficiency, collaboration, and innovation, leading by example on our values of Growth, Control and Challenge.

Other duties include:

• Lead, grow, and develop an FP&A team that ensures the numbers are always right and enables critical and impactful insight into business performance.
• Create conditions that deliver a highly competent, engaged and motivated team aligned to delivering high fidelity outcomes.
• Build relationships with internal and external stakeholders at all levels to ensure successful delivery.
• Work with stakeholders to define and continuously improve management reporting, ensuring the right information is available and used in decision making by both finance and the business.
• Lead the development and production of NATS’ annual business plans including financial targets and reporting acceptable to all key internal and external stakeholders.
• Ensure that strategic targets for the year ahead are clearly reflected in terms of safety, service, investment and cost efficiency.
• Lead cross‑functional teams to ensure the annual business planning process is completed on time to agreed standards (incorporating over 100 key stakeholders from Executive to senior management and their direct reports).
• Engage with staff including Trade Unions where appropriate over key areas of the business plan and influence senior stakeholders to agree cost targets.
• Manage and produce regulatory business plans for customer consultations and submission to the industry regulator for reference period pricing reviews.
• Act as ‘Bid Manager’ to establish the best course of action and key lines of plan content or economic argument to support achieving the best possible outcome, ensuring acceptable return at manageable risk.
• Chair the regulatory working group, and Chair or be a key member of the Executive Programme Board and attend the Board sub‑committee meetings.
• Provide support to customer consultations (airlines, airline representative bodies such as IATA, IACA, ELFAA) by preparing and delivering proposals and presentations and responding to information requests.
• Supervise preparation of monthly financial management reports and full year forecasts with explanation of performance and variances.
• Provide insight and decision-making analysis, identifying business critical issues and make recommendations that balance maximising financial outcomes with the realities of running the business.
• Develop and maintain effective controls, systems, processes and reporting to satisfy statutory, regulatory and other requirements and support effective planning, monitoring and reporting KPIs.
• Assess and implement new reporting technology to radically improve the way that finance information is shared.
• Perform ad hoc support activities including evaluation of share sales, investment cases and Merger and Acquisition activity for a variety of stakeholders including the CFO and CEO.
• Ensure that revenue and costs are allocated completely and accurately to the Regulatory Service Line for Eurocontrol.

Essential Skills and Experience:

• You must be a qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, CIMA) with significant senior financial management experience at strategic level.
• Prior experience within a large corporate organisation, with complex regulatory frameworks, rules, and constraints.
• Strong motivational leader, able to pull teams together, recognise knowledge, skills, and strengths in others and deliver common goals and objectives.
• An accomplished, credible and respected professional with well‑developed communication, stakeholder management and influencing skills, comfortable presenting at the highest level (Board/Executive).
• Strong analytical and conceptual reasoning skills, able to communicate complex issues to a wide range of recipients through a variety of formats.
• Excellent business awareness able to talk credibly to senior operational managers about business issues beyond financial implications.
• Significant experience of preparing management reports (written prose and financial data) and regular governance updates and proven skills in delivering high‑quality work within constrained timescales.
• Ability to plan & manage a varied workload to very tight timescales, with extremely high fidelity and accuracy.
• Willingness to work on complex and undefined problems and develop innovative approaches to find solutions.
• Willingness to make recommendations and/or take decisions which have material and real consequences for the business and its staff.
• Aviation related experience is advantageous, but we encourage and welcome applicants from other highly regulated industries such as energy/utilities, rail or nuclear.

Additional Vacancy Information:

We have adopted agile working to provide greater flexibility and increased choice over working arrangements, with the opportunity for this role to work in our modern office facilities as well as remotely. We are proud to offer a fantastic total reward package to help you thrive both personally and professionally. If you share our passion to advance aviation and keep the skies safe – we would like to hear from you, whatever your age, sex, race, faith, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, visible or invisible disability. Individuals that bring different perspectives, skills, life experiences and backgrounds help us be at the forefront of our industry.