Director of Financial Planning & Analysis, Marketing

Role Description

About Booking.com

At Booking.com, we are all involved in making hundreds of decisions every day. The decisions we make are a reflection of our Values - they reflect what is important to us, both as individuals and as an organisation.

When Values are made explicit, they provide clarity on what “good” looks like. And when they are shared, they build unity in a group. They build culture.

• Think customer first. We obsess about adding value for our customers - guests, partners, colleagues - to make it easier for everyone to experience the world.

• Own it. We deliver on our promises, make informed decisions and prioritize to get the important things done today.

• Learn forever. We are resilient, take time to reflect, and seek to learn – from colleagues, from the outside world and from our failures.

• Succeed together. We celebrate team success, through making connections, building trust and valuing the diverse perspectives of others.

• Do the right thing. We get the right results the right way. For each other, our communities and the world around us.

Profile

The purpose of FP&A is to provide Decision Making Insights to the right person at the right time - whether this be for big strategic decisions via business cases or tactical day-to-day steering through performance reporting & transparency. FP&A’s stakeholders are Director level above with Operational Support being handled with embedded teams throughout the organization.

This role leads a team of 15 FTEs, including multiple Business Partners supporting teams within the marketing organisation. By ensuring transparency of performance metrics, the team will help steer the Marketing Business Unit on tactical day-to-day matters such as:

• Strategy making by providing deep scenario analysis/modeling and translating the strategy into a tangible Business Plan.

• Providing in-depth business insights by forward-looking analysis, and by translating variances in financial and non-financial KPIs.

• Initiating and leading FP&A process improvement projects that drive the team’s vision and engages in cross functional excellence initiatives or company priorities.

• Ensuring documentation, SOX compliance, and controls under FP&A scope and compliance are up to company policies and standards.

• Developing a world-class team that achieves the team’s and department's quarterly and annual goals.

• Displaying the core competencies for success within Finance/FP&A and actively engaging in self/team-development opportunities that improve the overall proficiency.

The Director of FP&A Marketing is a key member of Booking.com Marketing leadership that actively participates in the company’s execution of strategic and financial ambitions. Success in this position requires focus and discipline towards value creation and optimization of spend along with return on investments, proposals for additional investments (when available), or managing trade off decisions when course corrections are needed.

This role will require building a strong partnership with all commercial disciplines within Booking.com while balancing and evaluating cross discipline investment options. These relationships must be built on the organization values and mindset such as customer centricity, having a learner & protagonist mindset, and should always include respect, integrity, cooperation, and professionalism.

This role also provides strategic finance leadership on data, AI-enabled decision support, and the evolution of customer acquisition economics across brands, channels, and commercial domains. The remit may flex based on business priorities, including support for governance forums, cross-functional investment trade-offs, rules of engagement with GMB, and ad hoc strategic initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Providing financial analysis, forecasting and budgeting & strategic support to the General Managers/SVP for the Marketing Business Unit.

• Preparing & consolidating financial statements, with relevant trade performance metrics, including ROI and customer acquisition cost trends, by channel, customer and product profitability, with comparison to plan and prior years.

• Improving financial planning and analytics to drive efficient, scalable, and measurable customer acquisition and commercial investment decisions across relevant brands, channels, and growth initiatives.

• Overseeing revenue, customer, and other non-financial performance metrics across relevant brands, products, and commercial motions, while enhancing predictive insight and forward-looking steering.

• Building a best in class FP&A team, highly engaged and empowered, working seamlessly across our locations, managing proactively succession plans, while coaching and encouraging talent development of the global FP&A team and direct reports. Overseeing a direct team located in the UK and NL.

• Working closely with Corporate Performance and BPO-Transformations pillar Leads and their teams across NL and UK to create an FP&A organization fit for the future. This implies one way of working, aligned objectives and deliverables to uplift our process, tooling and data capabilities for all of our business units.

• Leading FP&A’s stewardship of overarching customer acquisition economics, including ROI, payback, incrementality, and trade-off decisions across brands, channels, regions, and growth initiatives.

• Partnering with business, data, and technology teams to improve AI-enabled forecasting, predictive decision support, and the quality of data used for commercial and investment decisions.

• Shaping governance and rules of engagement for investment decision-making with GMB and other cross-functional stakeholders, ensuring clarity of ownership, performance measurement, and escalation paths.

Ideal Experience & Skills

• 12+ years of relevant working experience.

• Strong managerial skills with the ability to lead a team that is dealing with tough stakeholders, tight deadlines, and big impact projects.

• Excellent corporate agility to collaborate and build relationships at all levels of the organization.

• Ability to drive change and adapt quickly in an agile environment.

• Thorough knowledge of the industry in which Booking.com operates (e-commerce / travel) and where it is moving.

• Proven ability to marry financial constructs with business knowledge and work effectively with business partners, as well as with general management and functional teams.

• Experience in marketing, growth, commercial finance, or a tech-enabled consumer environment, with strong understanding of acquisition economics and investment trade-offs.

• Clear communication, change management and influencing skills.

• Capable of managing different levels of stakeholders and working under time constraints.

• Result driven, active team player and customer focused.

• Change driven, proactive and strong focus on improvements.

• MBA or equivalent preferred.

Jobs to be done / Objectives

• Working with the Marketing department to prepare targets and budgets that can then be consolidated into overall yearly & quarterly targets & budgets.

• Creating, updating, and maintaining financial models and detailed forecasts of the department’s 3 year plan.

• Examining and evaluating the cost-efficiency of the function, and how to contribute to margin optimization, on a direct basis but also with various anchoring contributions across all product verticals.

• Preparing internal reports for executive leadership to support decision making, by looking at return on investment (ROI) and comparing with other scenarios that utilize our cash.

• Comparing historical results against budgets and forecasts, performing variance analysis to explain differences in performance and making improvements going forward with regards to its operating model and partner distribution strategy.

• Improving and ensuring data governance & integrity on all key metrics.

• Determining which distribution product/channel combinations in which regions generate the biggest net contribution and creating a roadmap for continuous optimization of opportunities.

• Collaborating with FP&A colleagues on company-wide financial models and detailed forecasts of the company’s year and 3 year plan.

Other Personal Characteristics

• Open mind, learning attitude, transparent behavior, positive, overachiever, strong communicator, proactive and collaborative.

• Strategic thinker focused on execution; able to roll up sleeves to get things done.

• Able to function in a fast-moving entrepreneurial environment.

• Data driven, experimental, ready to learn and open to change.

• Keep the customer at the centre of everything you do.

• Good cultural and organizational sensitivity.