Head of Expenses in Telford

Overview

• Job Type: Permanent
• Location: This role could be based in any of our UK offices (London, Birmingham, Edinburgh or Telford) with time spent working in the office and at home. Some travel would be required to our London office if not based there.
• Flexible working: All of our roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process.
• Closing Date: 20th February 2026 (23:55)
• Salary and benefits: £115,000 - £150,000 depending on experience, indicative bonus range of 30% - 60%, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

Who are we?

We want to be the best place that any of our 6,600 colleagues have ever worked. We’re Phoenix Group, we’re a long-term savings and retirement business. We offer a range of products across our market-leading brands, Standard Life, SunLife, Phoenix Life and ReAssure. Around 1 in 5 people in the UK has a pension with us. We’re a FTSE 100 organisation that is tackling key issues such as transitioning our portfolio to net zero by 2050, and we’re not done yet.

The role

The Retirement Solutions & Asset Management Expenses Management (RS&AM) will be responsible for providing strategic leadership, high quality and sophisticated insights whilst effectively partnering with Executive level stakeholders and their teams to drive strategic business decisions and deliver stretched business performance targets. This is an exciting opportunity, to create and take ownership for the end to end Retirement Solutions & Asset Management cost base to ensure the aligned leadership team have a clear view of strategic priorities at all times. You will use your experience and knowledge to provide expert advice to the RS&AM Finance Director and the RS&AM Leadership team, managing spend for ongoing run costs and project spend, as well as assisting and challenging the business to help them meet their performance plans and targets. A critical element of this role is championing improvements in technology, processes, and data quality—ensuring the cost framework, reporting, and planning capabilities evolve to support future growth. You will contribute to internal and external working groups/management committees, giving expert opinion, influencing other business stakeholders and challenging where appropriate to ensure both commercial and regulatory requirements are met. As a Senior Leader you will effectively communicate complex information to a wide group of stakeholders, cost performance for finance; proposing options and recommendations for corrective actions to drive business performance.

What are we looking for?

This position requires someone who brings deep finance expertise paired with strong operational understanding, enabling them to influence transformation, drive efficiency, and support major change programmes including cost reduction, investment cases, and benefit tracking. We also need someone who is:

• A self-starter with proven track record business partnering at Executive & Director level.
• Demonstrates an ability to influence and challenge senior stakeholders in a collaborative and constructive way.
• Attention to detail to help us ensure our numbers are credible and can be validated to the external market and both internal and external auditors.
• Ensuring interlocks between supply and demand on our change resourcing and ensuring financials and resource planning are aligned to provide complete MI to the RS&AM Finance Director and RS&AM Leadership team.
• Leadership role for the RS&AM Expenses team, developing a high performing and motivated team.
• Working collaboratively with wider expenses team in Group Financial Performance and working with Actuarial colleagues in both Group Finance and RS&AM to support reserving and pricing.
• Understanding the end to end process of costs is a critical success factor.
• Experience of providing financial support for delivering cost reduction programmes.

We want to hire the whole version of you. We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you. If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best. We’re reviewing applications as they come in, so apply early to avoid missing out.