Regional Finance Manager (RFM) - LATAM

Regional Finance Manager (RFM) - LATAM

The Regional Finance Manager (RFM) is the most senior finance person with responsibility for a region, in this case the Americas. The region is then broken down into clusters, containing a number of individual factories and sales companies, each of which has a finance lead which reports directly to the RFM.

The RFM reports to the Director of Finance - who primarily leads one of the end market sectors, in this case Oil & Gas - but who also has responsibility for one of the three regions. The RFMs focus is primarily regional but has a dotted line into the other two DFDs who liaise with the RFM where there are questions about their sector (CPI or W&P) in this region.

• Fiscal control of all of the companies in the region.
• Manage, train, develop and motivate the finance team in the region. Take responsibility for performance reviews of the team, identification of high potential candidates and development of local training plans where appropriate.
• Identifying improvements in the control environment of the region's subsidiaries to ensure accurate and timely management and financial reporting.
• Provide support for the cluster leads across all aspects of the business.
• Review of finance reports explaining trends and variances within the region to ensure Country Leader understands the performance of the region.
• Play an active role in managing any ERP implementations in the region and use it as tool to monitor the companies remotely.
• While visiting and/or conducting meeting with companies in the region, detailed reviews of balance sheet accounts and monitoring of working capital/cash balances.
• Where feasible, visit at least once a year each subsidiary within the region.

• Taking overall control of the operating companies' income statement and balance sheet forecasts to ensure accuracy of the reporting to head office.
• Assisting the Country Leader and Regional Operations Director in the annual budget process to provide a full and correct view of the region's businesses. This will involve:
• Co-ordinating the work of Sector Leads / Country Managers / Plant Managers and controllers involved in the budget process, to ensure that they are correctly briefed on the needs of the process and that their input to it is correct, timely and in the required format.
• Give support at budget meetings in order to assist Sector Leads / Country managers / Plant Managers and controllers in correctly representing their objectives through the financial schedules.
• Drive improvements in forecasting accuracy within the quarterly profit report process.

• Control of statutory and management accounting for the region's separate legal entities. This includes knowledge of and compliance with current regulations, tax and other fiscal controls of the businesses.
• Responsible for internal control and risk assessment for each legal entity in the region. Follow up action points to ensure they are implemented on a timely basis.
• Constantly monitor and improve each company's systems and procedures relating to its accounting and reporting to ensure that total integrity is maintained within the systems in terms of:
• Compliance with group policies and procedures
• Compliance with local legal requirements
• Avoidance of fraud
• Provision of accurate and timely management information
• Stewardship of company assets
• Ongoing audit of transactions and processes to achieve the above

• Assisting DFDs, Country Leader or other directors with ad hoc financial assignments including acquisitions.
• Be a member of the Group internal audit team and perform internal audits of companies outside of the region.

Experience Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, or related field preferred
• At least 8 years post qualification experience, the latter part in a senior financial role.
• Ability to manage staff at junior and senior levels and work within a global matrix structure.
• Commercial finance experience and exposure to customers, suppliers and other aspects of a business would be an advantage.
• Candidate will have experience travelling to, dealing with and providing accounting oversight of regional and multiple international sites.
• Experience of credit risk, viability of vendors, quality of outside advisers would be useful but not essential, as would experience in implementing new finance and related systems.
• Significant risk management sensitivity and able to improve business practices to higher performance levels. A rigorous approach to identifying and helping to correct under-performance, backed by sound common sense and a mastery of 'the numbers' and their significance.

The Successful Candidate:

• Empowers teams to perform, setting high but achievable targets.
• Able to generate enthusiasm and passion in the function.
• Strategically skilled; able to balance the short term focus on results with the longer-term interests.
• A team player, yet able to retain independence of thought; constructively…