Cost Transformation & Senior Manager

Barclays UK; Greater London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial institution in Greater London is seeking a Senior Manager in Cost Transformation to drive initiatives aimed at identifying cost-saving opportunities. The role involves leading cross-functional teams, engaging stakeholders, and implementing strategic recommendations to enhance operational efficiency and customer experience. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in financial data analysis and transformation projects while demonstrating leadership and strategic thinking skills.

Qualifications

• Confident in interpreting operational and financial data.
• Proven experience in strategy or transformation roles.
• Excellent senior stakeholder engagement skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead initiatives to identify cost-saving opportunities.
• Engage with stakeholders to present findings.
• Support development of business capabilities for Finance.

Skills

Confident interpreting operational and financial data

Stakeholder engagement

Strategic thinking

Decision making

Education

Professional financial qualification (e.g., ACA, CFA, ACCA)

Job description

Overview

As a Senior Manager in Cost Transformation, you’ll lead initiatives to identify and agree cost-saving opportunities across Barclays UK, helping the bank achieve its financial objectives, address operational challenges, and deliver enhanced customer experience. Acting as an internal consultant, you’ll work with small, focused teams to analyse specific areas of the business, uncover opportunities for efficiency, and make recommendations that reduce costs or enhance customer experience.

You’ll take ownership of programmes and workstreams, from opportunity identification all the way to ensuring benefits is included in the financial plans. Your role will involve engaging with stakeholders, presenting findings, and ensuring improvements are implemented effectively. This is a high-impact position where your ability to combine strategic thinking with business partnering which will be key to shaping the bank’s cost transformation agenda and delivering sustainable change.

Essential Criteria

• Confident interpreting operational and financial data, defining analysis and metrics.
• Proven experience in strategy or transformation roles.
• Excellent senior stakeholder engagement skills.

Desirable Criteria

• Professional financial qualification (e.g., ACA, CFA, ACCA).
• Experience in cost optimisation or operational improvement projects.

You may be assessed on key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen, strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

Purpose of the role

To develop business capabilities for Finance through key stages of functional design, data, end-to-end-process and controls, delivery, and functional testing.

Accountabilities

• Functional Design: leveraging best practice concepts, and in collaboration with Line SMEs, support options analysis and recommendations as part of decision making.
• Data Analysis/Modelling/Governance: design conceptual data model underpinning all phases of the processes, and governance requirements in accordance with GDMS standards and principles.
• End-to-End Process & Controls - development of target process and controls design/documentation and operational runbooks and aligning these components with organisational and role/service model design definitions.
• Delivery/Implementation Support: update design/functional requirements throughout the development cycle, and resolve RAIDS related to functional requirements and business processes. Project management for change programmes that have limited technology investment.
• Functional Testing: develop scripts and data to test alignment to requirement definitions, ahead of user testing cycles.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures.
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements.
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others.
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions.
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.