Group Head of Finance Strategy and AI

About Waystone

Waystone is a leading asset-servicing solutions provider of institutional governance, administration, risk and compliance services to financial institutions. With over 25 years’ experience and a comprehensive range of specialist services to its name, Waystone helps our clients structure, operate and grow through our expertise, innovation and digitisation, backed by the operational scale to support global expansion.

Role Purpose

The Group Head of Finance Strategy and AI is responsible for defining and delivering the transformation of the Finance function, creating a simpler, more efficient, data-driven and technology-enabled organisation.

The role will establish continuous improvement as a core capability within Finance, ensuring that processes, technology, data and ways of working continually evolve rather than relying on periodic large-scale transformation programmes.

Working closely with the Group CFO and Finance Leadership Team, the role will identify opportunities to improve Finance effectiveness, efficiency and control; develop the transformation roadmap; and lead the delivery of initiatives that generate measurable business value.

A critical part of the role will be accelerating the adoption of automation, data and artificial intelligence across Finance, while building the capability of Finance teams to identify and deliver improvements themselves.

The role will also involve playing a key role in driving the broader adoption of AI and digitised processes across the group, including other non-client teams (Legal, the People Team etc). This will include working closely with the Director of Strategic Projects.

Key Accountabilities

1. Finance Strategy and Transformation

• Develop and maintain the Finance strategy and multi-year roadmap aligned to the Finance team’s priorities and wider business strategy.
• Translate the future vision for Finance into a clear portfolio of initiatives across Finance processes and operating model, organisation and ways of working, data and analytics, Finance technology, automation and AI, controls, and skills and capabilities.
• Ensure transformation activity is prioritised according to measurable business value rather than technology implementation alone.
• Own the Group's Finance, AI and data strategy, and contribute to the Group strategic planning cycle in partnership with Corporate Development and FP&A.
• Provide Finance leadership into major enterprise-wide change and investment initiatives, challenging business cases to ensure they are deliverable and value accretive, and present the AI and data strategy to the Executive Committee as required.

2. Continuous Improvement

• Build a culture of continuous improvement across Finance.
• Establish a consistent methodology for identifying, assessing and delivering process improvements using approaches such as Lean, process mapping, root-cause analysis and process mining.
• Create mechanisms through which Finance teams can identify friction, waste, duplication and control weaknesses within their own processes.
• Develop the skills and tools required for Finance employees to improve their own ways of working rather than making improvement solely the responsibility of a central transformation team.
• Establish clear measures of process performance and use data to identify and prioritise improvement opportunities.

3. Process Excellence & Operating Model

• Lead the simplification, standardisation and redesign of end-to-end Finance processes.
• Identify areas not currently influenced by Finance that can be optimised by the Finance team for improved Financial outcomes (e.g., working capital)
• Work with Finance process owners to establish clear ownership, standards, controls and performance measures for critical processes including record-to-report, procure-to-pay, order-to-cash, planning/budgeting/forecasting, management reporting, treasury and cash management, and financial/regulatory reporting.
• Challenge unnecessary complexity, manual activity, duplication and local variation.
• Support the development of the Finance target operating model, including decisions around centralisation, shared services, centres of excellence, outsourcing and automation.

4. Automation & Artificial Intelligence

• Own, develop and execute the Finance automation and AI agenda.
• Identify opportunities to use workflow, RPA, low-code technologies and AI to remove manual work, improve controls and increase Finance productivity.
• Develop practical AI use cases across transaction processing, reconciliations, financial close, variance analysis, forecasting, management reporting, financial commentary, data interrogation, controls monitoring and Finance knowledge management.
• Establish appropriate governance around the use of AI within Finance, working closely with Technology, Risk, Information Security and Data teams.
• Move Finance progressively from manual processing to automation, intelligent automation and AI-enabled decision support.

5. Finance Technology

• Own the Finance technology roadmap, in partnership with the CTO organisation.
• Ensure Finance systems support simplified and standardised processes rather than automating unnecessary complexity.
• Co-own, with the CTO organisation, decisions on major technology investments including Data warehousing, planning, consolidation, reporting, workflow and analytics platforms.
• Ensure business cases clearly articulate the financial and operational benefits expected from technology investments.

6.Finance Data & Analytics

• Own Finance data standards and governance, working closely with FP&A to improve the availability, quality and usability of Finance data.
• Promote consistent definitions of financial and operational KPIs.
• Reduce dependence on manual spreadsheet-based data manipulation and reconciliation.
• Support the development of self-service analytics and data-driven decision making throughout Finance.
• Ensure process-performance data is used systematically to identify improvement opportunities and measure transformation outcomes.

7.Transformation Portfolio Management

• Own the overall Finance transformation portfolio.
• Establish transparent governance covering initiative prioritisation, investment requirements, resource allocation, delivery milestones, dependencies, risks and benefits.
• Provide the Group CFO and Finance Leadership Team with clear visibility of transformation progress and decisions required.
• Intervene rapidly where programmes are failing to deliver expected outcomes.

8.Benefits & Value Realisation

• Ensure every significant transformation initiative has clearly defined and measurable outcomes.
• Establish robust baselines and track benefits including Finance cost, productivity, process cycle time, automation rates, error rates, control effectiveness, forecast accuracy, reporting speed, employee capacity released, business-partnering capacity, and cash or working-capital improvements.
• Maintain accountability for benefits after implementation rather than treating technical delivery as the definition of success.

9.Change & Capability Building

• Lead the organisational change required to embed new processes, technologies and ways of working.
• Develop transformation and continuous-improvement capability throughout Finance.
• Create communities of practice and internal networks of improvement champions.
• Work with Finance leadership to identify the skills required by the future Finance organisation, particularly across data, technology, AI, commercial analysis and change.
• Ensure transformation improves the employee experience by removing low-value work and allowing Finance professionals to spend more time on analysis, judgement and business partnering.

Leadership Responsibilities

• Act as a trusted adviser to the Group CFO and Finance Leadership Team.
• Challenge established practices constructively and confidently.
• Create momentum around transformation while maintaining strong stakeholder engagement.
• Build effective relationships across Finance, Technology, Data, Operations, Risk and the wider business.
• Lead and develop a high-performing Finance Strategy and AI team, with team size, structure and budget agreed with the Group CFO at appointment.
• Create a strong network of process owners and improvement champions across Finance, with process owners holding a dotted-line relationship to this role for transformation activity.
• Bring external thinking and emerging practices into the organisation.
• Balance innovation with appropriate financial control and governance.

Experience & Background

• Significant experience leading Finance transformation or large-scale Finance improvement.
• Strong understanding of Finance processes and operating models.
• Demonstrable experience delivering measurable productivity and efficiency improvements.
• Experience of ERP and Finance technology transformation.
• Strong understanding of automation, data and AI and their practical application.
• Experience of process improvement methodologies and continuous improvement.
• Strong programme and portfolio management capability.
• Experience working with senior Finance and business leaders (ExCo)
• Experience leading organisational and behavioural change.
• A professional accounting qualification may be advantageous but is not essential where the candidate demonstrates strong Finance transformation experience and commercial understanding.

Skills & Capabilities

Finance knowledge - Understands how a high-performing Finance function operates.

Transformation capability - Can turn ambition into executable change.

Process thinking - Understands end-to-end processes and systematically removes complexity.

Technology fluency - Understands ERP, automation, analytics and emerging technologies sufficiently to identify where they create value.

AI literacy - Can distinguish genuinely valuable AI opportunities from technology hype and translate them into practical Finance use cases.

Data orientation - Uses evidence and performance data to diagnose problems and measure improvement.

Commercial judgement - Prioritises initiatives according to economic value.

Change leadership - Can influence behaviour and embed new ways of working.

Delivery focus - Converts strategy into tangible, measurable outcomes.