Consultant to support Platform Finance Team (UAE Platform)

The Challenge:

This consultant will support the Platform Finance team in providing analysis of the portfolio and reporting financial KPI’s, assisting in asset management as well as deal support for new opportunities. This will include but not limited to providing insightful management reporting, supporting valuation of investments, budgets and business planning exercise and monthly forecasts of portfolio cash and returns.

Key Responsibilities:

Business Performance Reporting (30%)

• Preparing monthly Platform Report providing commentary on major KPI’s and analysis on Cash Distributions and Returns
• Providing monthly Sector financial performance reports
• Analyzing actual to budget variances and month on month changes in forecasted data.
• Capital Allocation tracking and reporting: Actively monitor Platform capital allocation, align with the strategy, and generate relevant reports on capital committed, deployed and remaining allocation.
• Monitoring spend against budget on monthly basis analyzing variances for reporting to the Sector leadership team.
• Review of assets performance on a monthly basis against business plan and reporting to Senior Management
• Providing financial data to address requests from the Sector Teams for ad-hoc analysis
• Enable business decision making process by analyzing the performance of the Platform, preparing scorecards, and cheat sheet, and conducting critical ad-hoc analysis
• Prepare and update the monthly scorecard for Sectors and Platform with the latest information and suggest areas of focus/improvements.

Valuations (25%)

• Supporting the quarterly valuation process, as needed
• Support Platform Finance team in reviewing financial models
• Review and understand valuation models and support Platform Finance team in understanding the numbers
• Demonstrate the practical application of the different valuation methodologies – DDM, DCF, multiples, etc. while analyzing the valuation of investments
• Reviewing and reconciling information in the relevant financial systems

Budgeting (30%)

• Support and coordinate the annual business plan process for the respective platform and support with management presentations as required.
• Support Platform Finance team in reviewing and validating Business Plans received from the asset management team
• Ensuring upload of business plans to the relevant financial system
• Providing reports to the asset management and platform finance teams as requested
• Populating Asset Dashboards with the latest plan data for senior management
• Review financial models, understand performance drivers, and be able to present budget to management
• Preparation of presentations to accurately reflect useful data points to the management for them to challenge/support/approve the budgets

Benchmarking and Analytics (15%)

• Support platform and business in benchmark analysis to ensure under/over performance to benchmarks is fully understood by the business teams and senior leadership
• Support platform and business in providing benchmark data for scorecard
• Support platform and business in ad-hoc analysis as required

Qualifications:

Knowledge, skills and experience:

• 5 to 7 years of experience (Preferably from a Big 4 audit firm)
• Accounting qualification - ACCA / CPA / ACA / ACMA, or CFA
• Knowledge in management reporting, budgeting and valuation
• Great team player, high ethical values, committed and cooperative
• Adaptable, flexible, with the ability to work and deliver to tight timelines with minimal supervision
• Advanced PowerPoint skills
• Advanced Excel knowledge in data compilation and aggregation