Finance Business Partner

Insights

Kantar is the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company and our Insights colleagues are experts in human understanding. They help clients define what brands should stand for, how to disrupt and renew their offer, how to connect with audiences and how to win with consumers and customers.

Job Details

The Finance Business Partner will report to the Finance Director of Kantar Insights Australia and New Zealand, with close daily interaction with the Regional Heads of Client Service, Consulting, Business Development and other local leadership team members.

This role supports the Australia leadership teams by crafting decisions, utilising opportunities, and delivering outcomes by providing insights, advising, strategic support and analysis to enable them to make informed decisions and actions that drive the best financial outcomes in terms of:

- Profitable growth and EBITDA
- Greater emphasis on working capital and cashflow
- Data driven decision making
- Investment in talent
- Better rigor through forward looking views improving transparency and predictability
- Better budgetary management of client projects and the cost base

Key Responsibilities:
Understanding the business, modelling and managing performance and business reporting
- Collate information running and delivering routine and ad hoc analysis and management reports, where not available in dashboards, support analysis, review, planning and control to manage resources in accordance with accounting principles
- Assist the evaluation of the service offering portfolio and mix, to provide insights and recommendations on job or contract performance to improve revenue and margin outcomes
- Develop and coach the Business Partner Analysts (BPAs) to support the business in managing jobs, predict trends & drive insights on jobs/product/domains/client etc and improve performance by providing recommendations to senior partners

Delivering and supporting business strategy and leading the Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting process
- Facilitate senior leadership team in forming a strategic response and providing useful insights from changing internal / external factors
- Facilitate business discussions on the plans and initiatives to drive practical and realistic budgets from the top-down targets, gather business inputs and provide constructive challenge on the action plans to drive the financial outputs

Shaping decisions, utilising opportunities, and delivering outcomes to the business
- Contribute to setting local market pricing strategies including rate cards, cost rates and new offer
- Participate in RFP pitches and support the negotiation strategy - including in sourcing and reviewing costs, competitive benchmarking and RFP schedules
- Run preliminary rate card scenario calculations and restatements

Developing talent in finance
- Coach and mentor finance team members
- Facilitate knowledge management - sharing standard process (especially with the Job Management team)
- Inspire performance and actively participates in BP and Finance community

Deliver on business priorities - Investments, business case and cost take out scenarios
- Provide Finance support and constructive challenge of strategies and execution
- Track and report through to savings and benefits realisation
- Drive a culture of continuous improvement through elimination, standardisation, simplification and automation. Initiate and support initiatives transforming role accountabilities, system, data and processes
- Be a catalyst and change advocate with focus on driving adoption to embed and sustain the changes

Role Requirements:

- Commercial mentality/business orientation
- Credibility and integrity with partners to build trust and influence
- Good interpersonal skills
- Proven experience as a finance business partner, commercial finance or business analysis role
- Able to balance a combination of big picture critical thinking and detail e.g. why are we doing this (strategy) and how are we going to get there (detail)

Country

Australia

Location

Sydney, Hickson Road

Why join Kantar?

We go beyond the obvious, using intelligence, passion and creativity to inspire new thinking and shape the world we live in. We understand more about how people think, feel, shop, share, vote and view than anyone else. Combining our expertise in human understanding with advanced technologies, nobody knows people better than Kantar.