Financial Planning Manager

Financial Planning Manager
£65,000-£75,000 pa + excellent benefits
Farringdon or Croydon

Are you passionate about financial planning? Are you interested in how big picture strategy and detailed numbers combine to shape a Housing Association’s success? Are you methodical and proactive? Do you want to help solve the national housing crisis? If yes, we have the perfect role for you as our Financial Planning Manager! 

Optivo is a growing organisation that is customer and colleague focussed. We are preparing for our forthcoming merger with Southern Housing Group. We are planning the merger to take place in the coming weeks creating a new 77,000 homes organisation.

As our Financial Planning Manager, your role will be to demonstrate our continuing financial viability through economic and business cycles with robust stress-testing and financial risk mitigation standby plans. You will co-ordinate the scoping, construction, maintenance and monitoring of our long-term and medium-term financial plans and measure our financial risk capacity with reference to key financial indicators including internal golden rules, lender covenants and rating agency metrics. 

You will also:

• Prepare Group-wide Long-Term Financial Plan (LTFP) and related regulatory returns with guidance from senior colleagues; manage day-to-day relationships with key stakeholders and project-manage timely delivery of an accurate and auditable plan.
• Review and update the plan as required from time-to-time to cover changes in business or economic conditions, including planning assumptions, stress-testing scenario analyses, financial risk triggers and mitigations.
• Engage with stakeholders to understand future operating cost drivers such as housing quality, building safety and decarbonisation and Treasury to understand borrowing needs. Read up on economic trends to inform our view on inflation and interest rates.
• Contribute to an engaged and high performing Financial Planning team; prioritise tasks to meet key milestones; apply judgement showcasing the highest professional standards, culture of continuous improvement and exemplary Optivo CORE values.

What you’ll need

• Professional qualification in accounting, treasury, banking or equivalent (such as ACA, ACCA, CIMA, CF, ACT, ACIB), or commitment to work towards one
• Understanding of key long term financial planning approaches and principles
• Knowledge of financial reporting, financial benchmarking, interpretation and analysis of financial statements and metrics is desirable
• Experience of Lenders’ key financial metrics and ratings agencies’ credit assessment methodologies is beneficial
• Experience of UK social housing or residential property development is desirable
• Excellent Excel modelling skills and model discipline
• Prior training to use financial planning software (Brixx) is highly desirable

Closing date: Tuesday 28th December 2022 at 23:59pm. We reserve the right to close this advertisement early if we receive a high volume of suitable applications. Depending on the number of applicants we receive we may interview before the advert closing date.

For more information and to apply, please visit our website via the apply button below. 

What's in it for you

• Pension
• Life assurance
• Healthcare cash plan
• Eyecare & dental
• Birthday leave
• Retailers discounts
• Cycle to work
• Buy & sell annual leave
• Season ticket loan
• In-house academy & career development
• Flexible working

Inclusion and Diversity
At Optivo we work hard to create a diverse and inclusive culture and environment where people are respected for who they are. Encouraging inclusion is not just about protected characteristics, it’s about celebrating differences of thought, opinion, experience and perspective of each individual. We’re all different in our own way and we want our colleagues to feel comfortable, that they belong, and are safe to be themselves at work, without fear of being judged or excluded, but valued for their contribution to our One Team approach.