Commercial Finance Business Partner

Location: Birmingham

We’re ZEISS Vision Care UK, based in Birmingham; an exciting place to work, where individuals make a real difference every day.

As the branded leader in lenses, we offer premium and pioneering products; innovation is at the heart of everything we do. Our brand enhances the lives and vision of millions of people around the world. In fact, 2 people every second put their trust in ZEISS lenses.

We're looking for a Commercial Finance Business Partner to join us on an immediate basis for a 6 month FTC.

THE ROLE

This is a critical role within the Carl Zeiss Vision UK (“CZVUK”) finance team, which requires a driven, ambitious and enthusiastic, commercially experienced qualified accountant to proactively partner the commercial department within the business.

The role reports into the Head of Commercial Finance and is crucial in driving profitable growth for the Company, and helping our customers to achieve their ambitions. The role is focussed on adding value into the business, driving the revenue and gross-margin growth in the relevant customer channels to achieve CZVUK’s ambitions.

Key Objectives

Principal lead for the Company’s customer-financing activity, enabling our customers to achieve their ambitions through loan support from CZVUK.

Primary contact for all stakeholders in the process (customers, commercial team, lawyers, auditors, and CZVUK senior management.

Provide strong financial analysis and insight, to support the business and enabling informed decisions relating to customer financing

Partner with commercial customer account teams to ensure a thorough understanding of the customer performance drivers relevant to a robust customer financing business case.

Conduct thorough financial and commercial due diligence of both prospective customer financing opportunities, plus ongoing due diligence for completed deals to ensure commercial and financial adherence to business case expectations and relevant contractual covenants.

Create business cases suitable for UK and Global Boards of Management, to enable timely approval decisions of customer lending.

Seek to improve and drive improvements in processes and controls within customer financing, which is high risk & high-profile area of UK business

Develop a Management Information reporting suite to enable holistic management oversight and KPI tracking of customer financing pipeline opportunity, protected revenue, expected revenue growth and business case adherence etc

Provide robust business partnering to the commercial teams

Develop trusting relationships with the Commercial Director, customer account teams and customers to enable and influence the commercial decision-making processes.

Provide strong financial analysis and insight to support business decisions across the relevant customer channel(s).

Ensure a robust understanding of the relevant performance drivers and help to identify potential revenue growth areas and profit driving initiatives.

Provide critical information into the commercial finance strategic planning processes and forecasting/budgeting cycles

Analysing the (short, medium, and long term) financial & strategic plan of the customer relevant channel(s), ensuring all deliverables are proactively and appropriately completed ahead of the deadlines.

Partner with the commercial customer account teams to coordinate the relevant commercial finance inputs required into all forecasting/planning cycles.

Partner with the Operations and Supply Chain teams to enable alignment of strategic growth ambitions and ensure a joined-up approach to volume, supply and operational/manufacturing capacity.

Ensure appropriate and sufficient analysis is performed to provide robust challenge into the planning processes and ensure that appropriate justifications/rationale are provided into submissions.

Assist the business in the evaluation of new opportunities and business change initiatives (including product portfolio reviews and product launches).

Provide detailed variance analysis to enable holistic understanding of underlying performance and leverage insights to drive future planning activity.

Look for opportunities to continuously improve the planning/ forecasting/ budgeting processes.

Support the delivery of financial management Information into the business

Assist in the preparation of the various weekly and monthly reporting requirements (e.g. weekly sales reports, monthly variance analysis and assisting with the General Managers commercial commentary).

Help to develop relevant and insightful performance reporting, highlighting key issues/risks/opportunities to key stakeholders.

Prepare scenario based decision proposals (i.e pricing or incentives) to help inform the strategic decision making.

Look for opportunities to continuously improve the financial management Information and related processes.

Support the advancement of CZV UK’s strategic project agenda

Lead &/or support cross-functional projects &/or workstreams as part of CZV UK’s commercial growth and business transformation agenda.

Deliver project updates and insights to senior leadership team.

Evaluation of associated financial opportunities and risks.

Assume accountability for deliverables & project output, including supporting business benefits realisation.

Manage stakeholder relationships within local subject matter experts, senior leadership team, wider ZEISS entities & external stakeholders (such as consulting firms, lawyers etc).

REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE

Must have

• Proven academics: Degree qualified or equivalent
• Chartered or Certified Accountancy Qualification: CA/ACA/ACCA/CIMA
• At least 2 years post-qualified experience
• Proven track record of working in a commercially focused role/environment

Experience with M&A due diligence

• Must be comfortable presenting at board level
• Ability to think beyond Finance and understand key business drivers that ensures decisions/actions will provide value
• Ability to summarise complex problems and communicate key information clearly.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Resilient, Self-aware and open to change
• Competent in problem solving, team building, planning and decision making
• Proven track record of managing and delivering performance excellence
• Proficient in all MS Office applications

Desirable

• Experience with data visualisation tools (PowerBI, Tableau or equivalent)
• Experience of developing analysis and reporting from SAP data/Business Warehouse/Business Objects
• Experience in lending assessments and credit loss considerations

Your ZEISS Recruiting Team

Abbie Walters