Enterprise Architect - Finance Strategy & Technology (London)

As an Enterprise Architect with deep Finance Strategy & Systems expertise, you will bridge the gap between enterprise technology and financial business objectives. You will design and govern architectures that enable financial transformation, ensuring alignment with CFO priorities. Your domain knowledge will drive the evolution of systems for core Finance platforms, Treasury, FP&A, and Risk systems, while optimizing costs and enabling data-driven decision-making.

The Finance enterprise architect proactively and holistically helps and guides the enterprise leaders, product managers, product owners and distributed product delivery teams through transformation and optimization initiatives, supporting the formulation of business strategy, outcomes and capabilities - helping Haleon to achieve targeted business outcomes related to growing revenue, optimizing costs and mitigating risks.

Role Responsibilities

Finance-Focused Enterprise Architecture (70%)

• Financial Systems Strategy: Define Finance strategy and target architectures and blueprints for core finance capabilities (GL, AP/AR, Consolidation, Tax, Treasury) and emerging needs such as AI-driven forecasting
• ERP & FinTech Leadership: Lead modernization of core Finance platforms and niche platforms e.g. Cadency. Analyze trends and disruptions, and assess their impact on targeted business outcomes
• Regulatory & Compliance Alignment: Architect solutions for SOX, and other mandates ensuring auditability
• CFO Advisory: Partner with Finance leadership to translate capital allocation, cost optimization, and M&A strategies into technical roadmaps. Tell stories to visualize the future state and trigger long-term planning and communicate the value of enterprise architecture, and its portfolio of services
• Vendor/Partner Evaluation: Assess fintech solutions for fit within the broader finance ecosystem and assist in managing the Vendor relationships

Cross-Domain Integration (20%)

• Design seamless data flows between finance systems and HR (payroll), Supply Chain (costing), and Commercial (revenue recognition) domains.
• Govern APIs and middleware for real-time financial data sharing.

Governance & Standards (10%)

• Enforce finance-specific architecture principles (e.g., single source of truth, closed-loop reconciliation).
• Champion FinOps practices to align cloud spend with financial accountability.

The Enterprise Architect will demonstrate competencies across five key dimensions.

Supports Formulation of Strategy and Guides Execution

Works with Business and Leadership Stakeholders to Develop Strategy

• Proactively identifies and helps the organization respond to disruptive forces. Understands the business’s economic and financial levers that are susceptible to digital transformation to effectively guide investment decisions.
• Leads the analysis of business and operating models, market trends and the technology industry to determine their potential impact on the enterprise’s business strategy, direction, and architecture.
• Provides perspective on the readiness of the organization to change and innovate through scenario planning techniques, and supports formulation of business strategy.
• Uses planning-driven, design-driven and learning-driven approaches to construct future- and current-state business models.

Connects Strategy to Execution

• Facilitates business and IT alignment, connecting strategy to execution, through a collaborative, supportive and consultative manner, driving the organization’s digital business strategies and balancing innovation and growth.
• Translates and guides execution of business strategy to achieve the organization’s targeted business outcomes by leading the development of an implementation roadmap for the enterprise architecture.
• Constructs technology-enabled business and operating models and provides viable options and visibility into execution issues.

Builds and Maintains Relationships

Builds the EA Value Proposition and Structures Business Engagement

• Builds the EA value proposition, contributing to positioning the EA practice as an internal management consultancy, offering services and skills to support the development and execution of business strategy.
• Develops a portfolio of consulting services, designed to meet business and stakeholder needs, and delivers in an agile and time-boxed way.
• Determines the relationship between people, processes, information, technology and other components of the enterprise operating model, and their relationships to one another and to the external environment.
• Enables Value-Based Messaging and Manages Cross-Functional Relationships
• Provides consultative advice, adapted to stakeholder context, to business leaders and organizational stakeholders who seek actionable recommendations to make investment decisions about the next business and operating model of their organization, using technology to make that change happen.
• Leads and facilitates interaction with business leaders, product managers and product owners in a business-driven conversation over the risks and implications of the product decision to the line of business, business unit and greater enterprise.
• Leads a collaborative community of architects and works with a strategic committee to guide transformation and resolve any conflicts IT delivery and enterprise business outcomes.

Orchestrates the Delivery of Business Outcomes

Develops the Business Architecture

• Positions the EA practice at the intersection of business and IT. Ensures that the EA practice is designed and enabled to formulate, translate and execute business strategy.
• Works with business architects and business leaders to identify key drivers and targeted business outcomes to derive useful business context.
• Develops diagnostic and action-oriented deliverables that help guide investment decisions in support of executing business strategy. for examples of deliverables that make sense for your organization.)
• Brings Alignment Across Business and IT
• Leads analysis of the business’ future-state capabilities and future (and current) IT environment to detect critical gaps and opportunities and recommend solutions for improvement to drive the business towards its targeted outcomes.
• Identifies organizational requirements for the resources, structures and cultural changes necessary to support the enterprise architecture.
• Works with the CIO and IT leaders to find the right EA organizational design to drive business-outcomes. This may include being part of fusion teams and supporting federated initiatives.
• Ensures that the EA organizational design process leads to a more efficient and effective business and IT operating model, significantly improved results (e.g., profitability, customer service, internal operations), and EA resources empowered and committed to the integration of business and IT.

Supports Solutions Design and Delivery

Supports Portfolio Modernization and Develops Roadmaps

• Maintains the alignment, integration and coordination of architecture activities across different programs, projects and products as they evolve over time.
• Presents gap analyses and/or IT investment roadmaps that reflect the status of the existing IT landscape, namely, its ability to contribute to future-state business capabilities around ecosystems and digital platforms.
• Leads analysis of the IT environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.
• Leads the development of an implementation plan for the enterprise architecture based on business requirements and the varying IT strategies for project-driven or product-driven delivery teams.

Supports Solutions Design and Delivery

• Develops and applies minimal viable architectures, which can include a set of standards, reference architecture patterns, principles and guardrails, through the EA governance model, which is informed by the business strategy and corporate governance. Clarifies accountability and provides the focal point for agile, effective and efficient decision making.
• Facilitates a collaborative relationship across architecture community, product management and product delivery teams by providing freedom-in-a-box for decision making, with the minimal viable architecture forming the boundaries of the box.
• Collaborates with delivery teams to ensure consistency with the enterprise architecture, as well as to leverage shared technologies, tools and processes that impact speed to value and time to market.
• Collaborates with infrastructure teams to ensure consistency with the enterprise architecture, as well as to identify when it is necessary to modify the enterprise architecture.

Credentials and Experience

• Master’s or bachelor’s degree in business, computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, system analysis or a related field of study, or equivalent experience.
• Significant professional business experience in strategic and operations planning and/or business analysis or experience as an enterprise architecture consultant.
• Demonstratable experience focused on finance systems (ERP, EPM, Treasury, etc).

Proven track record designing architectures for:

• Financial close automation
• Regulatory reporting
• Treasury & Risk
• Deep understanding of finance operating models (centralized vs. decentralized) and their tech implications.
• Fluency in finance KPIs (EBITDA, NPV, DSO) a]]>