Business

The Senior Managers and Certification Regime touches almost every FCA-regulated firm in the UK.

For a business preparing for FCA authorisation, recruiting the right senior management team is one of the most important decisions it will make.

There is a moment in the life of most growing businesses when the finance function stops working, and it arrives quietly. Nothing breaks. The invoices are still processed, the payroll still runs, the year-end accounts are still filed. What changes is that...

Few hiring decisions in UK financial services carry as much weight as a Senior Manager appointment. Under the Senior Managers and Certification Regime (SMCR), anyone performing a Senior Manager Function must be approved by the FCA, and for dual-regulated...

SMF" appears constantly in FCA correspondence, board papers and job adverts across regulated financial services, and yet it's rarely explained from first principles. This guide sets out what a Senior Manager Function actually is, why the designations exis...

Tax manager is one of the least useful phrases in a job specification. It describes at least four distinct disciplines with different technical demands, different candidate pools

There is a moment in most finance recruitment processes that determines the outcome, and it happens well before anybody sees a CV. It is the moment somebody decides what the role is called.

have placed a good number of fractional Financial Controllers now, and I have watched roughly as many of those arrangements settle into something a business genuinely relies on as I have watched quietly sour around month twelve.

When a Financial Controller tells you she is expecting, two clocks start at once: hers, counting down to leave, and yours, counting down to the month-end close that will need to land without her. The FC seat is the hardest in the finance function to cover...

Appointing good directors is only half of building an effective board; the other half is how the board actually works — how it evaluates itself, inducts new members, runs its meetings, and appoints for its most demanding roles.

The month-end close has defined the rhythm of the finance function for decades: a compressed, high-pressure window in which the team produces the management accounts, reconciles the balance sheet, identifies and accrues costs, and prepares the reporting p...

Ask any experienced finance director where they can tell, within a week of arriving, whether a finance function is any good, and most will give you the same answer: watch the month-end close. Everything shows up there.

A qualified accountant moving into an FCA-regulated firm for the first time is often surprised by how different the job feels.

The move from public practice to in-house finance — the ‘move to industry’ that the majority of ACA and ACCA-qualified professionals make at some point in their careers — is one of the most significant career decisions a qualified accountant makes.

The Fractional CFO has moved from a niche arrangement used by a handful of early-stage technology businesses to a mainstream finance team model over the past five years.

The two appointments at the very top of a business — the Chief Executive and the Managing Director — are the ones boards most often get nearly right, and nearly right is where the cost lives. A candidate who looks entirely defensible at offer stage can re...