Commercial Finance Business Partner

About the Role

The Commercial Finance Business Partner serves as a trusted strategic advisor to the leadership team, providing commercial and financial insight, objective challenge, and enterprise-wide perspective to drive growth, investment, improve operational decision quality and strengthen execution.

Responsibilities

Identifies growth opportunities and performance improvement priorities, leveraging knowledge, talent and proven practices across Crane.

Advises leadership in prioritising opportunities, resources and investments based on strategic fit, probability of success, risk-adjusted return, cash profile and organisational capacity.

Translates strategic objectives into measurable business outcomes through adherence to strategic planning, annual operating plans, forecasts, resource allocation, and performance management processes.

Leads a robust commercial operating cadence across pipeline, orders, backlog, revenue, margin, working capital, cash, and profitability, ensuring accountability for commitments and corrective actions.

Drives forecasting excellence by maintaining integrated pipeline-to-cash visibility, improving forecast accuracy, reconciling commercial and financial views, and proactively managing risks and opportunities.

Partners with Sales leadership to strengthen pipeline quality, opportunity qualification, funnel discipline, conversion rates, and forecasting performance while accelerating commercial responsiveness.

Evaluates and provides advice regarding major bids, tenders, contracts, renewals, and investment opportunities through rigorous financial analysis, business case development, risk assessment, and governance processes.

Develops actionable market, customer, product, and competitor insights to identify growth opportunities, improve commercial performance, and support strategic decision-making.

Leads pricing and profitability initiatives by promoting value-based pricing, improving pricing discipline, optimizing customer and product mix, and identifying opportunities to enhance margins and value capture.

Conducts customer, contract, product, channel, and portfolio profitability analyses to support strategic account planning, renewals, expansion opportunities, and long-term profitable growth.

Partners cross-functionally with Sales, Marketing, Product, Commercial Excellence, Operations, and Finance teams to align priorities, remove barriers, and execute commercial growth initiatives.

Drives cash generation and working capital performance by evaluating contract structures, milestone billing, collection risks, revenue recognition dependencies, and cash conversion opportunities.

Establish reliable commercial and financial reporting, analytics, and governance processes by improving data quality, system integration, performance visibility, reporting automation, and organizational decision-making capabilities.

Required Skills

The ideal candidate will have the following experience

• Significant experience in commercial finance, strategic finance, business partnering, deal support or growth-oriented finance leadership.
• Proven ability to partner effectively with senior Sales, General Management and business leadership stakeholders.
• Strong financial modelling, forecasting, pricing, profitability and scenario-planning capability.
• Experience translating commercial pipelines and backlog into credible revenue, margin and cash forecasts.
• Experience supporting complex solution sales, long sales-cycle businesses, tenders, government programmes or major contracts.
• Demonstrated ability to identify risks and opportunities early and convert analysis into practical countermeasures.
• Experience assessing complex contracts, including milestone structures, payment terms, delivery dependencies and risk allocation.
• Strong understanding of working capital, cash conversion and the financial implications of commercial terms.
• Ability to challenge constructively, exercise independent judgement and influence decisions without direct authority.
• Ability to operate effectively across multiple countries, cultures and functions in a matrix organisation.
• Excellent communication skills, executive presence, integrity and professional judgement.
• Evidence of improving business outcomes, rather than solely producing analysis or reporting.

Preferred Skills

• Experience in government solutions, authentication, secure identity, technology, software, Track & Trace or another regulated sector preferred.
• Exposure to public-sector procurement, bid governance and complex contract negotiations preferred.
• Experience applying a structured business operating system, continuous-improvement methodology or growth framework to improve commercial execution and performance preferred.