Senior Finance Manager - Control & Change

M&S is an iconic British retailer focused on own label businesses within Food and Clothing & Home, as well as Bank & Services. Today we operate as a family of businesses, selling high-quality, great-value own-brand products in the UK and Internationally from 1,509 stores and over 100 websites globally. Together our 70,000 colleagues across our stores and support centres, warehouses and supply chain serve nearly 30 million customers each year.

We are on our biggest ever transformation programme, with the objective to restore the M&S business and brand, to deliver long-term, sustainable, profitable growth for our investors, colleagues and wider communities.

We are looking to hire a Senior Finance Manager Change and Controls, to partner the wider business and finance teams through developing and maintaining a strong financial control environment in line with the increasing regulatory environment. To aid business growth and the transformation of M&S by supporting change and new business initiatives through identification of key control risks and establishing efficient and well controlled processes.

To stay close to customers, our support teams are in the office three days a week as we believe that skills are developed through collaboration, and that spending time together makes us more creative and connected.

Being a part of M&S is exactly that – playing your part to bring the magic of M&S to our customers every day. We’re an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and ever evolving business built on doing the right thing and bringing exceptional quality, value, service to every customer, whenever, wherever and however they want to shop with us.

Here are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special…

• After completing your probationary period, you’ll receive 20% colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third-party brands for you and a member of your household.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Discretionary bonus schemes awarded based on how you achieve your personal objectives and our performance as a business.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• A dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a wide range of training programmes to develop your skills.
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices portal to maximise your financial and personal wellbeing.
• Industry-leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility for your family.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to our 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist to support you and your family.
• A charity volunteer day to support a charity or cause you're passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.

Your key accountabilities will include

• Delivery of the Finance strategy objective to achieve an ‘advanced’ controls maturity status. Act as the senior team presence in the Manchester Business Service Centre, business partnering the senior Finance leadership, including supporting with best practice for controls and processes, and advising on control changes as a result of new process or process change
• Lead and direct the SAP GRC team responsible for the SAP Access Control ruleset in SAP GRC. Along with responsibility for maintaining the Financial Reporting Controls management system (SureCloud), and PowerBI models that drive financial controls reporting
• Responsibility for driving the bi-annual Finance Risk register review with senior finance stakeholders, including the completion of associated actions
• Support the development and delivery of the annual Controls testing workplan, and reporting results to the Finance Leadership Team. This includes monitoring controls Key Risk Indicators to proactively identify processes experiencing issues with controls
• Delivery of our controls framework to mitigate risk of financial misstatements through identifying key controls, control owners, a robust programme of controls testing and documentation, specifically:
  • Document “as is” accounting, process, and controls by working with process owners and IT colleagues
  • Document, track and agree changes to process and controls to remediate control weaknesses with key stakeholders
  • Document the “to be” accounting, process and controls; and train people to operate “to be” controls
  • Communicate and report the findings from testing to senior Finance and Business stakeholders as required
  • Monitor and drive the completion of any remediation arising from the process reviews and subsequent testing

Your skills and experience will include

• Experienced Chartered Accountant (ACA, ACCA, ACMA)
• Extensive financial controls experience (Industry in a similar role/Internal audit or Professional services advisory/External audit) – controls testing & design, best practice
• Strong knowledge of relevant technical standards e.g. US SOX, COSO, 2024 UK Corporate Governance Code changes, including Provision 29
• Shared services experience
• SAP S4 knowledge or experience advising on financial control impacts of ERP system change, desirable
• Experience/understanding of IT General Controls, desirable

We are ambitious about the future of retail. We’re disrupting, innovating and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We’re transforming how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. Marks & Spencer strives to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make change happen.

We are committed to building diverse and representative teams, where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and be at their best. We support each other and work together to win together.

If you feel you'd benefit from any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please don’t hesitate to let us know when completing your application. This information will be picked up by our team, so we can try and put steps in place to help you be at your best through this process.