Essential Qualifications, Experience and Capabilities
- Significant experience leading complex transformation across a sector and managing multi-year, multi-million value programmes in a relevant sector eg financial services, local government, consumer finance, regional economic development, building societies and mutuals/credit unions, or adjacent regulated environments.
- Significant experience in realising the opportunities for strategic alignment and navigating personality and political dimensions to success.
- Exceptional persuasion and funder and political influencing skills to bring alignment.
- Demonstrable experience designing and implementing interventions that shift organisational capability and achieve strategic growth.
- Proven stakeholder leadership – able to build trust with senior c suite leaders and boards across credit unions, funders, local, central and regional government, major employers, sector representative organisations, and cross-sector partners, and to influence in multi-stakeholder settings.
- Strong programme leadership fundamentals: planning, prioritisation, governance, risk management, reporting and delivery through ambiguity.
- Commercial acumen including budget ownership, commissioning/procurement, contract management, and an ability to assess delivery feasibility and delivery risk.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills – able to tailor messages for technical and non-technical audiences and represent the organisation externally with credibility.
Desirable Experience and Capabilities
- Experience working with, or navigating expectations of, regulators and government stakeholders relevant to local and regional government, retail financial services/credit unions.
- Experience of delivering programmes funded by public or quasi-public funding and operating with strong accountability requirements.
- Familiarity with impact investment / blended finance approaches where public/impact capital is used to catalyse greater levels of private investment to deliver long term sustainability.
- Knowledge of affordable credit and savings ecosystems, including scale-up approaches across community finance providers and partnerships with mainstream financial services.
- Understanding of the credit union and/or community finance landscape, including practical constraints to scale.
Personal Characteristics
- Purpose-led and motivated by improving financial wellbeing for people in vulnerable circumstances.
- Systemic thinker: able to connect policy, market dynamics, organisational capability and customer outcomes into a coherent transformation approach.
- Collaborative and credible – builds trust quickly, brings partners along, and navigates sensitive sector dynamics constructively.
- Bold but measured: comfortable testing new approaches while maintaining strong governance and accountability.
- Clear communicator who can translate complexity into action and maintain momentum across multiple workstreams.