The Economist is a leading source of analysis on international business and world affairs, published weekly in print and digital editions, and daily through our Espresso app and Economist.com. We deliver our information through a range of formats, from newspapers and magazines to conferences, films and digital editions. What ties us together is the objectivity of our opinion, the originality of our insight and our advocacy of economic and political freedom around the world.
Headquartered in London, The Economist Group has offices and people across the globe, and is valued by its customers for its world‑class insights and rigorous analysis. We have individual and corporate customers for our analysis, data and educational offerings. We value individuals who think differently and can challenge the status quo.
What we ’ r e looking for
The Economist Group is embarking on a programme to replace our core Finance platform. Our approach is to prioritise simplifying current processes and ensure our workflows and data structures are clean before we transition. This foundational work is critical to ensuring accurate and streamlined operations sit at the heart of our commercial engine as well as allowing us to take advantage of the emergence of AI in financial platforms.
This role will primarily focus on core Finance processes within the Group Finance team and across the wider function. We are looking for an experienced Senior Business Analyst on a 12 month FTC to collaborate with Finance teams to investigate and evaluate their workflows, Finance platform data architecture to determine their fit for financial accuracy, billing, and month‑end reporting.
While this role will primarily focus on Finance workflows, you will collaborate across other workstreams. This role will be central in identifying which workflows should be re‑engineered and implemented now to drive immediate efficiencies, versus which elements should be scoped but held for the future ERP implementation.
The successful candidate will be a skilled navigator of complex stakeholder landscapes. You will collaborate with a wide range of business and finance stakeholders to build a consensus for change and approach. Rather than being embedded in deep technical delivery, your focus will be on defining the high‑level requirements and changes to feed into other product and engineering teams for execution.
We need someone who can align commercial requirements with clear financial controls. You must be comfortable working at a strategic level to validate the business challenge and mapping data assets and structures to ensure that when we migrate to a new ERP, the upstream data from Salesforce is clean, reliable, and optimised.
Accountabilities
How you will contribute:
- Process Diagnostic: Lead the end‑to‑end confirmation of current Finance workflows, specifically identifying where data workflows currently require manual finance activities and workarounds in our legacy PeopleSoft environment.
- Strategic “Fix vs. Hold” Recommendations: Critically evaluate complex Finance workflows to determine which should be “cleaned up” immediately as a “no‑regrets” move to drive efficiency today, versus those that should be documented and held as requirements for the future ERP implementation.
- Cross‑Functional Stakeholder Alignment: Facilitate engagement across a wide range of business stakeholders and build consensus on future processes that bridge the gap between commercial activity and financial integrity.
- Requirement Elicitation: Elicit business and finance requirements from Business and Finance teams, either documenting for the future ERP implementation or handing off to Engineering teams for immediate execution.
- Data Lineage & Integrity Mapping: Investigate the relationship between workflows and data objects and Finance activities across multiple systems and business teams including billing, revenue recognition, customer management to ensure accuracy and clean data flows.
- AI Transformation potential: Experience in process re‑engineering that takes advantage of AI capabilities whilst maintaining suitable finance process and audit rigor.
- Transformation mindset: Bring a transformation mindset to an area of potential by leading creative discussions to unblock stuck thinking and reimagine the future state.
- Impact Assessment & Risk Mitigation: Conduct analysis on how proposed upstream changes affect financial controls and auditability, ensuring we don’t “double‑fix” processes or create migration risks for the future ERP.
Experience, skills and professional attributes
To succeed in this role it would be an advantage if you possess:
- Finance Transformation: Experience in the pre‑implementation or process optimisation phase of a Finance Transformation, ideally involving the replacement of legacy ERP systems.
- Finance Domain Expertise: Experience with Finance team workflows and an understanding of how commercial business data capture impacts downstream General Ledger and billing functions.
- Strategic Process Design: A track record of identifying “no‑regrets” process efficiencies in complex, manual environments and making data‑driven recommendations for immediate vs. future state implementation.
- Adept Stakeholder Navigator: Expert ability to co‑ordinate a diverse stakeholder map with diverse agendas and priorities towards decisions in the business interest.
- Requirement Elicitation: Expert in eliciting business requirements with clear value links to both business strategy and finance needs
- Strategic Adaptability: The ability to work effectively in a high‑level, strategy‑focused role while the wider programme manages simultaneous RFP and business case workstreams.
Please note: this is a 12-month fixed‑term contract (FTC)
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