Senior Finance Business Partner - Expenses - 6 Month FTC

Job description and person specification

Senior Finance Business Partner – Expenses

Division: Finance – Financial Performance

Reports To: As per Beazley’s organisation chart

Relationships: Executive Management, Finance Leadership Team, FP&A, Allocations, Expense / Financial Control, Cost Management, Platform Management Committees, Chief Underwriting Office, Underwriting teams, Claims, Distribution and Marketing, Operations / BSS, Group Actuarial and Strategic Finance, Support Functions, Technology / Change and other business stakeholders.

Summary

The Senior Finance Business Partner will provide commercially focused financial leadership to senior business stakeholders, owning the financial relationship and story for their areas of responsibility. The role combines strong FP&A and business partnering capability with a deep understanding of how business operations, activities, products and platforms interact to create value and drive the Group’s P&L.

The role will challenge performance, expenditure and forecasts and work collaboratively with FP&A, the Allocations team, Expense / Financial Control, Cost Management and business leaders to ensure actual activity, budget allocations and reported financial performance are understood, controlled and clearly articulated.

The individual will demonstrate confidence and credibility when engaging with Executive Committee members and senior leaders, be able to simplify complex financial and operational issues into clear commercial recommendations and influence decisions through insights rather than authority.

This role offers significant exposure to Executive Committee members and senior leadership teams and provides the opportunity to influence strategic investment decisions, operating model choices and long-term financial performance across the Group.

Responsibilities

• Strategic finance business partnering
• Build trusted relationships with executives and business leaders, understanding their strategy, priorities, challenges and decision-making needs.
• Lead the financial contribution to annual strategic planning processes, ensuring alignment between business strategy, resource allocation and financial outcomes.
• Act as senior Finance representative for designated Executive portfolios.
• Attend relevant management forums and present a concise financial story covering performance, drivers, outlook, risks, opportunities and recommended actions.
• Challenge assumptions and improve stakeholders’ understanding of the financial implications, risks and trade-offs associated with different scenarios.
• Identify performance gaps and work collaboratively with stakeholders to develop and deliver course-correcting actions.
• Deep understanding of business operations, products and platforms
• Develop a deep understanding of operational activities performed within supported areas and how those activities support the Group’s underlying products and platforms.
• Understand end-to-end flow from business activity through operational capacity, resource requirements, costs, allocations and ultimately the product, platform, entity and Group P&L.
• Represent financial story of how activities support underlying products and platforms, helping executives explain economic rationale for costs allocated to their areas.
• Understand key operational and commercial drivers and use this understanding to distinguish genuine changes in underlying activity from changes caused by accounting, allocation or modelling assumptions.
• Expense planning, budgeting and forecasting
• Lead expense planning and forecasting process in partnership with FP&A and business.
• Challenge forecasts using operational drivers, contractual commitments, workforce plans, activity levels and known business changes rather than simply accepting submitted numbers.
• Support annual budget and medium-term planning across product, platform and entity dimensions.
• Ensure stakeholders understand financial impact of their plans and the relationship between operational activity, cost and financial performance
• Partner with P&S and business leaders on workforce planning and organisational design to assess financial implications of hiring, restructuring, location strategy and capability planning.
• Monitor leading indicators and identify emerging risks, opportunities and delivery gaps early.
• Cost management and value for money
• Work closely with Cost Management to identify addressable spend, efficiency opportunities, productivity improvements and cost-reduction actions.
• Understand material contracts, people costs and discretionary expenditure within supported areas and use this knowledge to provide effective challenge.
• Assess whether expenditure is generating the intended business value and support executives in making informed trade-offs.
• Track agreed cost actions and benefits and ensure cost reduction does not undermine critical business outcomes or service quality.
• Allocations ownership and partnership
• Be able to articulate a clear narrative on the Group cost baseline, enabling stakeholders to understand why costs move between products, platforms, entities and functions.
• Identify and explain material differences between actual activity and the allocation model, distinguishing operational changes from changes in allocation methodology or assumptions.
• Align with Allocations team to ensure proposed methodology changes are evidence-based, governed, transparent and consistently applied.
• Investment and benefits realisation
• Evaluate business cases and resulting strategic investment decisions.
• Challenge and track delivery of expected financial returns and benefits against approved business cases.
• Influence prioritisation and ensure capital investments deliver strategic value.
• Provide financial leadership to strategic change initiatives.
• Financial control and data integrity
• Work collaboratively with Expense / Financial Control to ensure actuals reflect underlying business activity.
• Review material movements, accruals, prepayments, POs and other relevant items before close and challenge omissions or unusual movements.
• Ensure information is accurate, timely and sufficiently transparent to support decision-making.
• Escalate control or data-quality issues where appropriate while retaining ownership of the business-facing financial story.
• Data and analytics
• Leverage advanced analytics, scenario modelling and predictive forecasting to improve financial insight, decision support and data visualisation.
• Identify opportunities to leverage technology, automation and AI to improve business productivity, enhance decision-making and reduce operating costs.
• Define business requirements for finance data and reporting solutions.
• Insight, reporting and decision support
• Turn financial data into clear insight using visuals and storytelling appropriate to the audience.
• Develop and maintain meaningful KPIs, metrics, dashboards and driver-based analysis that support operational and strategic decision-making.
• Use technology and improved data capabilities to increase speed, quality and relevant financial insights.
• Leadership and continuous improvement
• Coach and support Finance Business Partners and Business Partners where appropriate, sharing best practice and raising capability.
• Promote a culture of ownership, constructive challenge, collaboration and problem solving.
• Continuously improve ways of working, reducing transactional activity and increasing time spent on insight and decision support.
• Take accountability for commitments, learn from issues and actively seek opportunities to improve personal and team performance.

Competencies

Core competencies in addition to those noted as specific requirements for the role and which are considered to be pertinent to the Expense team are as follows:

Financial planning and analysis: Strong knowledge of budgeting, forecasting, management reporting and financial analysis, with the ability to challenge and improve planning processes.Business acumen: Deep understanding of how operational activity, products, platforms, revenue drivers and cost structures translate into financial performance.

Commercial acumen: Understand market dynamics, competitor performance and industry trends to bring insights into financial planning and decision making.

Allocations and cost attribution: Experience of, or strong aptitude for, allocation methodologies, cost attribution and explaining financial outcomes across products, platforms, entities and functions.

Communication and storytelling: Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to explain complex financial and allocation matters clearly to senior stakeholders.

Strategic thinking: Ability to connect financial analysis to business strategy, identify implications and provide decision-relevant recommendations.

Stakeholder management: Proven ability to build trusted relationships while maintaining sufficient independence to constructively challenge senior stakeholders using available data and insights.

Collaboration: Ability to work effectively across FP&A, Allocations, Cost Management, Expense / Control, Technology and business teams.

Insurance expertise: Experience within a complex insurance environment, preferably specialty insurance and/or Lloyd’s.

Technology and data literacy: Ability to use data, digital tools, systems and AI-adoption to improve insights, reporting and ultimately decision support.

Problem-solving: Ability to identify root causes, distinguish symptoms from underlying drivers and develop practical solutions.

Continuous improvement: Effectively manages changing priorities in a dynamic environment. Continuously improves processes, reporting and decision support to increase efficiency, insight and business value.

Accountability and adaptability: Has integrity and hold’s themselves to account. Demonstrates ownership, resilience and adaptability whilst maintaining high standards in changing or ambiguous environments.

General

It is important that within all your interactions both internally and externally you adhere Beazley’s core values - Being Bold, Striving for Better, and Doing the Right Thing. We also expect Beazley employees to:

Comply with Beazley procedures, policies and regulations including the code of conduct

Undertake training on Beazley policies and procedures as delivered by your line manager, People or Risk teams (compliance, risk, internal audit) either directly, via e-learning or learning management system.

Comply with any specific responsibilities necessary for your role as outlined by your line manager, the Culture & People or assurance teams (compliance, risk, internal audit) and ensure you keep up to date with developments in these areas.

Carry out additional responsibilities as individually notified, either through your objectives including membership of any Beazley committees or working groups.

Personal Specification

We are a flexible and innovative employer offering a friendly, collaborative,  diverse and inclusive working environment. We actively encourage and expect applications from all backgrounds. We empower people to choose where to work given the work they need to do. Collaboration in office spaces is important but we do not mandate a set number of days in the office or from home – you decide what works best for you and the role you are in. Beazley will offer the person a competitive salary and discretionary bonus with a strong benefits package including commuting reimbursement, free in-office lunch, excellent parental leave and financial physical and mental wellbeing contributions among others.

Relevant qualifications and capabilities are listed as follows

Qualifications, Education and Experience

• Qualified accountant (ACA/ACCA/CIMA or equivalent)
• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business or related subject
• Experience of the insurance market, preferably including Lloyd’s
• Significant FP&A, business partnering or commercial finance experience
• Experience within a large complex corporate, preferably insurance or financial services

Success Measures

• Improve forecast accuracy.
• Provide actionable insights leading to measurable business outcomes.
• Influence major strategic and investment decisions through finance insight and challenge.
• Delivery of agreed business case benefits vs business cases.
• Improve stakeholder satisfaction with finance support.
• Identify and deliver cost optimisation opportunities.
• Increase use of driver-based decision making.
• Expense ratio / productivity improvement vs targets.
• Communicate a clear narrative / understanding of cost base.
• Ensure understanding and acceptance of allocation methodologies.