Brand Finance & Business Management Sr. Associate

As a Sr. Associate Brand Finance and Business Ops Lead, you are the catalyst for financial discipline and operational excellence, ensuring every marketing dollar delivers measurable impact. You’ll partner directly with Brand leadership to optimize complex budgets and translate financial data into actionable insights that drive smarter, strategic decisions. This hybrid role serves as a key partner to the Brand organization, functional teams and Line of Business stakeholders.

As a Sr. Associate Brand Finance and Business Ops Lead, you’ll own and optimize complex marketing budgets, build & maintain executive dashboards, and drive strategic decision-making that shapes the Brand’s financial health and operational excellence. Your day will be spent partnering with the Head of Brand Finance & Business Ops, along with other members of the Office of the Chief Brand Officer, to track spend, manage contracts and payments, support resource allocation, and contribute to executive-level strategic planning — all while ensuring every dollar delivers maximum impact. By streamlining processes and advancing AI initiatives, you’ll play a critical role in strengthening the Brand team’s resilience and drive innovation across the organization. Your work directly empowers the Brand team to operate efficiently, make informed decisions, and achieve ambitious goals.

Job Responsibilities

• BUDGET MANAGEMENT & GOVERNANCE: Own ongoing budget planning, governance, and oversight across Brand’s creative and research budgets – both discretionary and cross-line of business. Track and validate spend across all budget lines, assess ROI, and ensure financial discipline at every stage. Candidates should be comfortable managing complex, multi-line budgets, building dashboards, graphs, and complex macros/formulas in excel, as well as creating PowerPoint presentations for executive leadership
• BUSINESS STRATEGY & PERFORMANCE TRACKING: Guide strategic decision-making by developing business cases and tracking performance against goals. Partner with leadership to identify opportunities for cost optimization and operational efficiency across all Brand activities.
• REPORTING & DASHBOARD DEVELOPMENT: Build and maintain detailed reports and dashboards for the CBO, CFO, CMO, and LOBs on a monthly,  and ad hoc basis. Develop macros, evaluate large datasets, and create audience-specific decks that communicate financial and operational insights clearly. Leverage Workfront to build or enhance dashboards tracking resource allocation, capacity, and campaign planning.
• CONTRACT, INVOICE & PAYMENT MANAGEMENT: Process and track invoice payments, ensuring timely completion through payment tools including ARIBA, OPTIMA, EXPRESS PAY, ApprovEx, and ICM systems. Partner with Brand Leadership to support annual agency planning.
• PROCESS & OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT: Support process improvement and operational efficiencies across Brand activities. Function as a liaison between the Brand Strategy team and brand managers on budget management. Proactively identify and resolve issues impacting Brand operations.
• RESOURCE & HEADCOUNT MANAGEMENT: Partner with resourcing teams to support headcount allocation and capacity planning. Use Workfront data to identify over- and under-capacity across the team and generate regular reporting for leadership. Support cross-line of business allocation initiatives.
• AI TRANSFORMATION SUPPORT: Help establish governance frameworks and assess the financial and operational viability & production scalability of AI initiatives. Research, develop, track, and report on key metrics and progress, ensuring alignment with strategic goals and anticipated ROI. Partner cross-functionally to obtain requirements, secure executive approvals, and ensure compliance with strategic initiatives.

Required qualifications, capabilities and skills

• Must have strong finance / account and business management background with at least 3 years hands-on experience managing large, complex budgets
• Advanced Excel proficiency required — comfortable building & maintaining dashboards, excel macros/formulas/models, and complex tracking tools from scratch
• Bachelor's Degree or MBA required, in finance, accounting or business administration
• Highly organized & process-oriented self-starter with a strong work ethic; Bring structure and solutions to ambiguous situations
• Ability to balance multiple workstreams, simultaneously, in a fast paced environment
• Ability to aggregate large datasets and translate into clear, decision-enabling narratives tailored to different audiences
• Experience generating detailed financial and operational reporting for senior executives (C-suite level)
• Familiarity with procurement and payment systems (ARIBA, OPTIMA, or similar) a strong plus
• Experience with Workfront or comparable project/resource management platforms a strong plus
• Familiarity with marketing/business operations, campaign/forecast planning, or agency/retainer management
• Exposure to governance frameworks or process roadmap development a plus

Preferred qualifications, capabilities and skills

• Proactive self-starter who brings structure and solutions to ambiguous situations
• Experienced working in large multi matrixed organizations
• Strong project management and organization abilities
• Strong communicator and able to present financial data and operational insights to both finance and non-finance audiences; Can translate insights into actionable outcomes
• Strong judgment around confidentiality, particularly related to headcount, transformation activities, and budget details
• Understanding of financial services and products

Additional Information

• A Finance & Business Operations professional who thrives at the intersection of numbers and narrative. 
• Someone who has managed complex, multi-line budgets, built reporting infrastructure from the ground up, and isn't afraid to get into the weeds of a spreadsheet while also being able to walk into a room with the Head of Brand Finance and tell a clear story.
•  Experience in a finance / accounting related environment is a plus, but what matters most is financial rigor, operational discipline, and the ability to figure things out in a complex organization.