Head of Business Planning

We are looking for an exceptional finance leader to join Royal Mail Group as Head of Business Planning, a high-impact role at the heart of our financial leadership team. This role is critical to how we plan, forecast and manage performance across the Group. You will lead our end-to-end financial planning and forecasting framework, ensuring our strategic plans, budgets, in-year forecasts and cash-flow visibility are robust, consistent and aligned to corporate priorities. Working closely with Executive stakeholders, you will provide the insight that underpins decision-making in a complex, fast-moving environment.

What you'll be doing:

• Own and lead Royal Mail's strategic planning, annual budget and in-year forecasting processes, ensuring high quality, timely and consistent outputs.
• Set and manage the Group financial planning calendar, with clear governance, milestones and dependencies.
• Define business unit submission requirements, including central assumptions, templates and guidance, to ensure comparability and alignment.
• Consolidate and analyse financial plans and forecasts, producing clear, insightful summaries for Executive and senior leaders.
• Own short-term (13 week) and long-term cash-flow forecasting, providing clear visibility of liquidity, risks and opportunities.
• Provide financial leadership to cross-business change and transformation initiatives.
• Drive continuous improvement in forecasting capability through simplification, standardisation and automation.
• Work closely with Anaplan and systems teams to enhance planning, forecasting and reporting through effective use of technology.
• Lead, develop and coach a high-performing Business Planning team, fostering strong technical capability and a culture of continuous improvement.

What you'll bring:

• Significant experience in financial planning, budgeting and forecasting within a large, complex organisation – FMCG or large retail would be highly desirable.
• A proven track record of leading group-wide planning processes with multiple senior stakeholders.
• Strong leadership and influencing skills, with the ability to operate effectively at Executive level.
• Excellent analytical skills and the ability to translate complex financial information into clear, actionable insight.
• Experience of designing and improving planning processes, with a focus on simplification and automation.
• Strong systems capability, ideally including Anaplan or equivalent planning tools.
• Experience supporting major business change or transformation programmes.
• You will be a qualified accountant (CIMA, ACA, ACCA or equivalent).

Why join us?

This is a rare opportunity to shape how Royal Mail plans for the future. You'll operate at the centre of the organisation, with Group-wide visibility and influence, and play a key role in delivering financial clarity, discipline and insight at a pivotal time for the business. This role offers significant scope to make your mark.

Extra Benefits:

• Family friendly support – enhanced maternity pay, paternity leave, adoption leave and shared parental leave.
• Supportive and generous company sick pay.
• Funded Dental – as a manager you are eligible to a level of employer-funded dental insurance.
• Health Assessment – as a manager you are eligible to an employer-funded health assessment every 2 years.
• Benefits Account – you will have access to your personal benefits account on our My Bundle+ platform.
• Your Wellbeing – you and your family have 24/7 access to services and tools to help you get the most out of life.

The next stage of the selection process will be a face-to-face/virtual interview consisting of competency-based and role-specific questions. Royal Mail Group is committed to inclusion and representing the diverse communities we serve. We welcome applications from all individuals.