Financial Controls Lead - BPL

As Financial Controls Lead within Barclays Payments, you’ll play a pivotal role in designing, implementing, and embedding the financial control framework for a newly established Barclays Payments business. Working at the forefront of a significant transformation, you’ll take ownership of the policies, processes, and procedures that underpin the Barclays Payments Limited (BPL) control environment. You’ll assess the current state of Barclays’ control framework and lead the integration of appropriate controls into BPL, ensuring a robust and scalable operating model that supports long-term growth.

You’ll work closely with stakeholders across Finance, Operations, Tax, Treasury, and Risk to define and implement best-in-class controls, policies, and governance processes. You’ll be responsible for ensuring controls are operating effectively, overseeing testing activities, and maintaining clear evidence of control execution and compliance. As part of the build-out of a new ERP platform and broader FinTech infrastructure, you’ll have a unique opportunity to establish an embedded control framework from the ground up, helping to shape a strong, well-governed finance function and supporting the successful growth of Barclays Payments.

Barclays’ payments acceptance business provides critical infrastructure to the UK economy, processing billions of pounds of payments annually for both small businesses and domestic and international corporate clients.

In April 2025, we announced a long-term partnership with Brookfield Asset Management to grow and transform the payments acceptance business by broadening the range of services offered, enhancing the experience for both existing and prospective clients. Leveraging extensive client relationships and deep experience of UK payments, we will create an environment of continuous innovation - activated by Brookfield’s global private equity expertise in payments, technology, operational transformation and corporate carve-outs - to ensure the business is strategically positioned for long-term growth.

Barclays will invest approximately £400m in the new business, the majority of which will be incurred during the first three years. Performance-linked incentives will drive greater alignment between the partners, underpinning the long-term commitment to the transformation. Barclays and Brookfield will work to create a standalone entity over time, continuing to use the Barclaycard Payments (BPL) brand and acting as the sole payments acceptance services provider to Barclays’ clients for a minimum of ten years.

For more information on our partnership with Brookfield, please visit Barclays.com.

To be successful as a Financial Controls Lead, you should be able to demonstrate:

• Extensive Financial Controls experience, including the design, implementation, testing, and monitoring of control frameworks within a regulated financial services environment
• Background within a FinTech, Payments, or Electronic Money Institution (EMI) environment
• In-depth understanding of the Finance function, including governance, risk, and controls frameworks
• Ability to communicate financial and risk information effectively to senior stakeholders across all organisational levels

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills.

Purpose of the role

To design, develop and consult on the bank’s internal controls framework and supporting policies and standards across the organisation, ensuring it is robust, effective, and aligned to the bank’s overall strategy and risk appetite.  

Accountabilities

• Identification and analysis of emerging and evolving risks across functions to understand their potential impact, and likelihood.
• Communication of the purpose, structure, and importance of the control framework to all relevant stakeholders, including senior management and audit.
• Support to the development and implementation of the bank's internal controls framework and principles tailored to the banks specific needs and risk profile including design, monitoring, and reporting initiatives  .
• Monitoring and maintenance of the control's frameworks, to ensure compliance and adjust and update as internal and external requirements change.
• Embedment of the control framework across the bank through cross collaboration, training sessions and awareness campaigns which fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and improvement in risk management and the importance of internal control effectiveness.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.