LAB Finance Executive Director

This role is the LAB Finance Executive Director (Finance Director) for the LAB system (UK, Netherlands, Belgium), with full accountability for financial stewardship, regulatory compliance, governance, and finance transformation across three complex markets.

What You'll Do

The Finance Director for the LAB system (UK, Netherlands, Belgium) is a senior finance leadership role with full accountability for financial stewardship, regulatory compliance, governance, and finance transformation across three complex markets.

The role combines deep technical finance leadership with strategic business partnership, ensuring robust controls, regulatory confidence, and high-quality decision support, while leading a geographically distributed team through ongoing SAP-enabled transformation.

The Finance Director acts as a trusted advisor to system leadership, global finance, and external stakeholders, balancing commercial ambition with prudence, integrity, and long-term sustainability. The role plays a critical part in the overall success of the LAB system, acting as the senior finance authority across markets and contributing directly to system-wide strategic, commercial, and investment decisions.

Key Responsibilities

Financial Leadership & Stewardship

• Provide end-to-end financial leadership across the LAB system, with full accountability for financial stewardship, performance management, and decision support.
• Ensure accurate, timely, and transparent financial reporting in line with local GAAP, IFRS, and global policies.
• Lead budgeting, forecasting, long-range planning, and performance management for the LAB system, including ownership of the annual planning cycle and coordination with global finance timelines.
• Translate complex financial information into clear, actionable insights for senior leadership and partners.
• Provide strong commercial finance leadership to system and market leadership, supporting decision-making on pricing, client economics, investment prioritisation, and portfolio performance.
• Partner closely with Managing Directors and Partners on financial topics with direct client impact, including payment terms, invoicing structures, collections, and transparency on client profitability.
• Maintain overall accountability for end-to-end finance operations, ensuring effective and compliant execution of core finance processes across the system.

Regulatory, Tax & External Authority Engagement

• Act as the senior finance lead for direct engagement with HMRC (UK), Dutch Tax Authorities, and Belgian regulators.
• Oversee statutory compliance across all three markets, including Netherlands SAPIN II anti-corruption compliance and Belgian regulatory requirements.
• Serve as the primary senior interface with external auditors (PwC), ensuring audit quality, timely closure, and issue resolution.
• Lead responses to tax audits, regulatory reviews, and compliance enquiries with confidence and credibility.
• Ensure ongoing compliance with evolving regulatory, tax, and governance frameworks.

Governance, Risk & Internal Controls

• Establish and maintain strong internal control environments across all entities.
• Ensure compliance with global finance policies while tailoring controls to local regulatory and operational realities.
• Oversee risk management, internal audit coordination, pensions governance, insurance, and company secretarial matters.
• Proactively identify and mitigate financial, operational, and compliance risks.
• Promote consistent application of BCG Finance risk management principles and minimum standards across the system, supporting awareness and disciplined execution.

SAP & Digital Finance Enablement

• Act as senior sponsor for SAP-enabled finance operations, ensuring stability post-implementation and continuous optimisation.
• Ensure effective embedding of SAP across Record-to-Report, Source-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, and compliance reporting processes.
• Partner with Global Finance and Technology teams to improve data integrity, reporting quality, and automation.
• Champion AI literacy and digital adoption within the finance function to enhance efficiency and insight.

Team Leadership (Onshore & Offshore)

• Lead and develop a distributed finance organisation, including onshore country teams and offshore/shared service teams.
• Manage and mentor senior finance professionals (Controllers, Heads of Finance, senior managers), ensuring depth, succession planning, and capability building.
• Create clear accountability models across geographies, balancing centralisation with local statutory needs.
• Foster a high-performance, inclusive culture grounded in trust, coaching, and continuous development.

Strategic Business Partnership

• Operate as a trusted advisor to the System Leader, Managing Partners, and Global Finance leadership.
• Support strategic decisions on pricing, investments, cost optimisation, client contracting, and resource deployment.
• Balance short-term performance with long-term value creation, compliance, and reputational integrity.
• Contribute to system-wide and global finance initiatives as a senior thought partner.
• Collaborate closely with Partner Services and Treasury teams to support effective execution of partner-related financial processes in line with global policies.

What You'll Bring

Essential

• Fully qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, CIMA, CPA or equivalent), with strong academic foundations and a university degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or Business Administration.
• Extensive (typically 15–20+ years) senior finance leadership experience, including operating as part of a leadership team within professional services, partnership-based, or similarly matrixed environments.
• Proven track record of influencing change and driving outcomes within complex, matrixed, international organisations.
• Strong hands-on and technical expertise across financial reporting (including US GAAP and local GAAP), tax, audit, compliance, and internal controls.
• Proven experience engaging directly with regulators and tax authorities.
• Demonstrated ability to lead senior finance professionals across geographies.
• Strong SAP literacy and experience operating within ERP-enabled finance environments.
• Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills, with credibility at senior leadership and external authority level.

Desirable

• Experience operating in professional services or partnership-based environments.
• Exposure to large-scale finance transformation and shared service models.
• Experience navigating matrixed global organisations.
• Coaching or people development credentials.

Leadership Attributes

• Calm, grounded, and values-led leadership style, with high integrity and strong professional judgement.
• Coaching-oriented people leader who develops talent, builds trust, and supports long-term capability building.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and complexity while maintaining clarity and focus.
• Strategic thinker with the discipline to execute.

Who You'll Work With

The System Leadership Team and the Regional Teams; other leaders within the Regional Finance Teams as well as the respective teams in the systems; BST, SBUs and global leadership teams, the group of Managing Directors & (Senior) Partners of BCG.