Finance Senior Manager - Crew Expenses

MSC Cruises; Piano di Sorrento; On-site; EUR 95,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

MSC Cruises seeks a Finance Senior Manager to oversee group crew expenses and coordinate with FP&A, Crew Management, Ops, HR and other teams in Italy. You will translate crew cost dynamics into robust budget assumptions and actionable insights.

With 15+ years in FP&A or operational finance, you will challenge cost evolution, define governance routines, develop KPIs and dashboards, and ensure timely information flow for senior stakeholders across the organization.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in FP&A, controlling, business partnering, or operational finance, ideally within a complex international environment.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate end-to-end monitoring of Group crew expenses across entities, ships, and operations.
• Serve as finance point of contact for crew cost topics, aligning inputs from Italy-based teams, Malta-based activities, and Group functions.
• Translate complex crew cost dynamics into clear financial insights and recommendations for senior Finance and business stakeholders.
• Define, implement, and continuously improve processes, procedures, and governance routines for crew cost planning, monitoring, reporting, and decision-making.
• Develop dashboards and management packs for crew cost governance and performance monitoring.
• Identify data gaps and propose improvements to enhance accuracy, transparency, and decision-making.

Skills

Cross-functional coordination

Analytical mindset

Budgeting & forecasting

KPI governance

Stakeholder management

Communication skills

Process governance

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or related field

Master’s degree or MBA is a plus

Tools

Excel

Power BI

SAP

Tagetik

Job description

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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 to evaluate the financial impact of operational or contractual changes.

Your Journey so far

• 15+ years of experience in FP&A, controlling, business partnering, or operational finance, ideally within a complex international environment.

Your Essentials

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or a related field; Master’s degree or MBA is a plus.
• Strong ability to coordinate across multiple teams, align stakeholders, and drive progress without direct hierarchical authority.
• Excellent analytical mindset, with the ability to link operational drivers to financial impacts and explain variances through clear cause-effect logic.
• Solid experience in budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, KPI definition, and performance monitoring.
• Process- and governance-oriented profile, able to design procedures, ensure adoption, monitor compliance, and standardize reporting practices.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to challenge assumptions constructively and translate complex topics into clear messages for different audiences.
• High proficiency in Excel, Power BI or other reporting tools, ERP systems such as SAP, and EPM systems such as Tagetik.

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