The Role
We're looking for a Strategic Finance Manager to own planning, forecasting and performance insight across the business. You'll be the finance partner leadership relies on to turn data into decisions: shaping budgets, modelling growth scenarios, and bringing commercial rigour to every major bet we make.
This is a high-visibility role working directly with the founders, the executive team and department heads, and it's suited to someone who wants to build, not just maintain.
Planning & Forecasting
- Own the annual budget, rolling forecast and long-range business planning process across UAE and KSA operations and products, including consolidation.
- Build and maintain the company's core financial models covering revenue, GMV/AUM, product and channel unit economics, headcount, opex, cash flow, liquidity and runway.
- Run scenario and sensitivity analysis to support strategic decisions, market expansion, capital allocation and fundraising.
- Own regular reforecasting and provide forward-looking analysis of risks, opportunities and expected performance against plan.
- Own headcount and manpower planning, partnering with People and department heads to maintain hiring plans, forecast employee costs and assess headcount against budget.
- Build financial models and business cases for new products and strategic initiatives, assessing revenue potential, cost structures, unit economics, cash requirements and overall financial viability.
- Maintain forward-looking cash flow, liquidity and runway analysis and assess funding requirements under different operating scenarios.
- Support longer-term business planning and financial modelling for new products, regulatory initiatives and geographic expansion.
- Support financial modelling and analysis for new regulatory frameworks and strategic initiatives, including VARA-related planning, working closely with Compliance.
Performance & Insight
- Own Monthly KPI reporting across markets and products, including GMV, AUM, investor acquisition and retention, conversion, average investment value, CAC/LTV, rewards, contribution margins and transaction volumes.
- Own preparation of recurring monthly and quarterly financial performance commentary, including MD&A, highlighting key movements, risks, opportunities and implications for the business.
- Analyse product, campaign and channel performance, identifying the underlying drivers of revenue, margin and customer economics.
- Develop investor and cohort analysis covering acquisition, retention, repeat investment, LTV, yield, dividends, vacancy and portfolio performance to support commercial and customer decision-making.
- Own and develop daily and automated performance reporting to provide management with timely visibility over key financial and operational metrics.
- Partner with Data and Accounting teams to validate underlying financial and operational data and maintain consistency across reporting sources.
- Review and support accounting methodology where commercial arrangements affect management reporting, including revenue recognition and classification of revenue and cost items.
- Identify, reconcile and clearly communicate differences between business and accounting reporting methodologies.
Strategic Partnership
- Partner directly with founders and senior leaders across Growth, Product, Sales, Operations, Marketing, People, Data and Compliance to align resources with priorities and support strategic and commercial decisions.
- Evaluate business cases, pricing, promotions, rewards, commercial structures, new product lines and investment decisions through robust financial analysis.
- Own financial analysis of promotions, rewards and customer incentives, assessing cost, contribution margin, customer behaviour and overall commercial economics.
- Own and prepare the monthly Marketing and Sales performance review presented to co-founders and Sales, Marketing and Growth leadership.
- Model and review Sales and Operations commission structures, including monthly calculations for the relevant teams.
- Provide regular and ad-hoc strategic financial analysis directly to founders and Heads of Department to support time-sensitive commercial, operational and investment decisions.
- Identify and evaluate cost-efficiency opportunities across technology, suppliers and operating expenditure.
- Partner with budget owners to challenge assumptions, monitor spend and ensure resources remain aligned with business priorities
Board, Shareholder & Investor Reporting
- Develop Board and shareholder materials covering historical performance, forecasts, long-range business plans, scenarios, sensitivities, risks and key strategic drivers.
- Translate detailed financial and operational performance into concise Board and shareholder narratives highlighting key drivers, risks, opportunities and strategic implications.
- Own preparation of quarterly management accounts for shareholder and investor reporting, working with Accounting to ensure consistency with the underlying financial statements.
- Respond to financial and performance-related shareholder and investor queries and prepare supporting analysis as required.
- Support fundraising and due diligence processes through financial modelling, historical analysis, forecasts and preparation of supporting financial information.
Build & Scale
- Lead the ongoing development of Abacum as the company's FP&A platform, covering planning, forecasting, reporting and data integration.
- Develop and automate recurring financial, KPI and commercial reporting to improve reporting speed, accuracy and scalability.
- Partner with Data teams to define Finance data requirements, resolve reporting issues and develop reliable datasets and dashboards.
- Support the financial planning of future geographic expansion.
- Identify opportunities to use automation and AI-enabled tools to improve the efficiency and quality of financial analysis, planning and reporting.
What You'll Bring
- 5–8 years in FP&A, strategic finance, investment banking, PE/VC or management consulting, ideally including time in a high-growth startup or scale-up
- Expert financial modelling skills (three-statement, scenario and unit economics) and advanced Excel/Google Sheets
- Proven ability to present to senior leadership and board-level stakeholders
- Strong commercial judgement: you ask "so what?" before anyone else does
- Comfortable with ambiguity, pace and building from scratch
- Degree in Finance, Economics, Accounting or a related field; CFA, ACCA, CIMA or CPA is a plus
- Experience in fintech, proptech, real estate or asset management
- Exposure to DFSA or other financial-services regulatory environments
- Familiarity with BI tools (e.g. Looker, Power BI, Tableau) or planning software
