Finance Senior Manager - Crew Expenses

Location: Piano Di Sorrento

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Your Purpose
We are looking for a highly structured and proactive Finance Senior Manager to oversee and coordinate MSC Cruises’ Group crew expenses. Functionally reporting to the Finance Controller of the Crew Employer, the role is based in Italy, where the Crew Employer has a service provider. The role will act as a key link between FP&A, Crew Management, Operations, HR, and other relevant teams, ensuring that crew cost dynamics are properly understood, challenged, monitored, and translated into robust budget assumptions, actionable performance insights, and clear governance routines.

Your Impact
Crew Cost Monitoring & Cross-Team Coordination

Coordinate the end-to-end monitoring of Group crew expenses, ensuring consistent visibility across key cost drivers, entities, ships, and operational areas.

Act as the finance point of contact for crew cost topics, integrating inputs from Italy-based teams, Malta-based activities, and Group functions, while ensuring alignment with FP&A standards.

Connect operational dynamics with financial impacts, clearly explaining cause-effect relationships behind cost movements, variances, and emerging trends.

Build effective relationships across Finance, Crew Management, HR, Operations, Procurement, and other stakeholders to ensure timely information flow and issue resolution.

Promote accountability and coordination across teams, ensuring that assumptions, actions, and ownership are clearly defined and followed up.

Budgeting, Forecasting & Business Challenge

Support the definition, validation, and challenge of crew cost budget and forecast assumptions, ensuring assumptions are evidence-based, consistent, and aligned with operational plans.

Analyze variances versus budget, forecast, and prior year, identifying the underlying drivers rather than only reporting financial deviations.

Work closely with stakeholders to challenge cost evolution, headcount assumptions, rotations, contractual impacts, productivity trends, and one-off effects.

Translate complex crew cost dynamics into clear financial insights and recommendations for senior Finance and business stakeholders.

Contribute to reforecasting and mid-term planning processes, ensuring that risks, opportunities, and corrective actions are reflected in the numbers.

Support business cases and initiatives aimed at optimizing crew costs, productivity, and overall cost governance.

Processes, Procedures & KPI Governance

Define, implement, and continuously improve processes, procedures, and governance routines for crew cost planning, monitoring, reporting, and decision-making.

Ensure that governance processes are clearly documented, consistently adopted across teams, and supported by defined roles, responsibilities, timelines, and escalation mechanisms.

Design and maintain relevant KPIs to monitor crew cost evolution, productivity, efficiency, and operational performance.

Ensure that reporting outputs are standardized, reliable, and focused on business-relevant insights rather than purely transactional data.

Identify data gaps, process weaknesses, and inconsistencies, proposing practical improvements to enhance accuracy, transparency, and decision-making.

Support the development of recurring performance reviews, dashboards, and management packs for crew cost governance.

Risk, Opportunity & Performance Management

Proactively identify risks and opportunities related to crew expenses by analyzing trends, operational inputs, contractual changes, and internal data.

Provide early warning signals on cost pressure, productivity deterioration, assumption gaps, or execution risks.

Recommend corrective actions and follow up with the relevant teams to ensure ownership and timely implementation.

Support scenario analysis and sensitivity assessments…