Senior Commercial Leader - Milton Keynes in Luton

About The Role

LOCATION: Milton Keynes with occasional travel

HYBRID WORKING: Our current hybrid working policy requires a minimum of 60% of working time to be based in the Milton Keynes office however flexibility is expected to meet the needs of the business and the role.

CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent opportunity

CLOSING DATE: 22/5/26. We reserve the right to close the advert earlier if we receive a high volume of applications.

We're looking for a highly experienced and inspirational commercial leader with a significant sales-based background within a Captive Automotive Financial Services organisation and/or OEM. You'll report into our CEO and will drive our business forward through our teams in Sales, Sales Compliance and Development and, through strong, productive relationships across Volkswagen Group, our dealer network and brands. In this pivotal and influential position you will use your extensive commercial leadership skills to develop and deliver the Retail Sales strategy to maximise distribution channels, while creating opportunities and optimising new routes to market. You will role model our Guiding Principles, build a culture of psychological safety and inclusion and provide ethical leadership to deliver great customer outcomes.

What you'll bring:

• You’ll be a forward-thinking, strategic and motivational leader who delivers results through people, cross-functional teams, and 3rd parties to support the delivery of volume, breadth, and profit objectives.
• You’ll have a progressive and developmental mindset with demonstrable experience of developing strategic commercial initiatives.
• You have extensive experience in customer-facing environments with specific skills implementing and managing risk strategies, strong financial management, leading cross-functional teams and functional management.
• Through your experience of developing and managing customer-facing processes, you have ensured fair treatment, transparency, value to customers and all other guidance from regulators has been accomplished.
• More generally, you’ll have experience within regulated environments - ideally by the FCA along with a deep understanding of the UK business governance and regulatory regime and requirements implementation compliance monitoring and management specifically, in organisations of a comparable size and scale.
• You have successfully driven change and you're comfortable in dynamic, changing environments in a leading role.
• You have well-developed emotional intelligence, influencing and communication skills which you can use to share information, listen, and create two-way dialogue that builds openness and commitment and involve others to maximise contribution overall.
• With great skills of analysis, you can interpret issues objectively to make sound decisions for the business that uphold our customer needs and good customer outcomes as a priority.
• You are highly proactive, flexible, pragmatic, and able to react appropriately and effectively to changing circumstances and demands.
• You’ll effortlessly fit into the Commercial leadership structure with the potential for growth within FS or the OEM.
• You’re collaborative and ambitious and work in the interest of customer and stakeholders, even when your own objectives are challenged.
• You set and role model standards of behaviour, culture and performance and ensure those standards are embedded across the organisation.

What you'll be doing:

• You’ll report to the Chief Executive Officer for VWFS UK Ltd and lead the Retail Sales department and the teams responsible for Finance Sales, Sales Compliance, Sales Development and Dealer Network Oversight.
• You’ll be responsible for developing sales strategies, policies, and procedures for the UK VWFS Group companies.
• Develop and maintain strong productive relationships across senior management, departments, brands and key stakeholders.
• Your span of control is across VWFS UK, VW Bank GmbH and compliance is required across the European Organisational Handbook (E-OHB), the FCA and the European Central Bank (ECB).
• You’ll have a team of circa. 50 people who work with our dealer network of circa. 800 sites to drive FS and network performance.
• Be an agent for change by embracing new ways of working, innovative technologies and agile attitudes to work promoting minimal viable everything attitude to encourage a collective growth mind-set in support of modernisation of the business.
• You’ll develop and implement plans to meet objectives through existing and new routes to market by utilising current and establishing new relationships with 3rd party retailers, emerging technology, and tech providers.
• Plan and deliver sales, margin and market penetration objectives.
• Lead sales activity that complies with internal and external regulations with the Consumer Credit Sourcebook (CONC) taking precedence over conflicting guidelines this includes Vulnerable customers, product suitability and transparency and behaviours and competence of introducers of our products.
• Use strong negotiation skills with our network and 3rd parties, to grow sales, protect margin and support good customer outcomes.
• Effectively manage introducer relationships through a robust communication infrastructure, clear performance indicators, and development with corrective action in place as appropriate.
• Lead the sales engagement with our Enterprise Risk Framework and develop robust and effective reporting to support transparency with regulators.
• You’ll engage and cooperate with VW companies in the UK to coordinate and implement joint strategies and build and maintain an effective industry network.
• You’ll play a leading role within our Credit Assessment & Retailer Services functions.

What's in it for you?

• Bonus: Discretionary on-target bonus of up to 25% (based on personal and Group company performance)
• Pension: Employer pension contribution of 9% (based on employee contribution of 3%). VWFS will pay 6% if employee chooses a 2% employee contribution.
• Car schemes: Choice of Employee Car Ownership (ECO) scheme for petrol/diesel and hybrid vehicles plus car insurance and fuel card. OR Company Car scheme for Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) plus car insurance cover for you and a partner/eligible family member.
• Other benefits: From day 1 we provide income protection, life assurance (4x salary), retail discount vouchers, access to Care Concierge (a service to support carers of adults), along with other salary sacrifice options including a will writing service and cycle to work (subject to scheme restrictions).
• Following successful completion of probation, you will have access to private medical insurance for you with the option to buy additional family cover and your family access to our loan car scheme for up to 2 cars for your partner or eligible family members (subject to scheme restrictions) and during our annual benefit window you can purchase critical illness cover and dental cover, so you can select the benefits that matter to you.
• We invest in our people and are passionate about driving development. You’ll have access to LinkedIn Learning via our Degreed platform as well as a host of professional development programmes and opportunities to build your technical and soft skills so you can further develop your career. We also offer mentoring schemes and reciprocal partnerships recognising that we can all learn from each other in the flow of work.

About You

About Us

Why join VWFS UK?

You’ll have the opportunity to make a difference by helping us to achieve our mission. Our mission is straightforward; we want to be 'The Key to Mobility'. That means we make getting from A-to-B as easy and simple for as many people as possible. To truly meet the mobility needs of people in a changing world, our offering goes beyond traditional vehicle financing. We do this by providing a range of finance and aftersales products on Volkswagen Group vehicles, as well as developing innovative mobility products designed to solve real problems and support our customers.

No candidate will meet every single desired qualification. If your experience looks a little different from what we've identified and you think you can bring value to the role, we'd love to learn more about you!

VWFS is proud to be an inclusive employer and encourages applications from a diverse range of candidates. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion isn't just a statement for us, we encourage and aspire for all our colleagues to be their 100% self. If you need any reasonable adjustments to assist you with the application and/or recruitment processes, please contact our Resourcing Team.

The Retail Sales Director is a Certified /Senior Manager role under the Senior Manager and Certification Regime (SMCR) and the role holder is required to comply with the FCA's Conduct Rules. A mandatory requirement of the SMCR is for VWFS to certify that the role holder is fit and proper to perform the duties on an ongoing basis.