Lead Business Planning & Analysis

Job Description Summary

#LI-Hybrid

Ready to turn financial insight into meaningful business impact? In this senior individual-contributor role, you’ll lead Business Planning & Analysis activities across Digital, Data and IT Finance, partnering with senior leaders to shape decisions, strengthen financial performance and translate complex data into clear, actionable insights. You’ll bring a CFO mindset, taking end-to-end ownership of planning, forecasting and performance management while navigating complexity, influencing across functions and developing proposals and solutions with limited direction.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities

• Lead Business Planning and Analysis activities, providing high-quality financial insights and decision support to business leaders.
• Drive consistent implementation of financial planning processes, strategies and policies across the organisation.

• Deliver timely management reporting, forecasts and financial analysis to support informed business decisions.

• Lead detailed budgeting and forecasting to support global, regional and business planning.

• Develop early-warning financial tracking to identify emerging risks, opportunities and performance trends.

• Analyse expenses, cash flow, investments and project costs to identify opportunities to improve performance.

• Partner with leadership on financial, cost and risk analysis, translating insights into corrective actions.

• Deliver profitability, resource allocation and benchmarking analysis to shape short- and long-term priorities.

• Provide transversal leadership across BPA workstreams, aligning stakeholders and driving outcomes through influence rather than formal people management.

Essential Requirements

• Significant experience in Business Planning and Analysis, financial planning or a closely related finance discipline.

• Strong expertise in budgeting, forecasting, management reporting and financial performance analysis.

• Proven ability to translate complex financial information into clear insights and recommendations for senior leaders.

• Strong business partnering and senior stakeholder-management skills, with the confidence to challenge constructively, influence decisions and operate with a CFO mindset.

• Demonstrated experience analysing financial risks, opportunities, costs, profitability and business performance.

• Proven transversal leadership, with the ability to align senior stakeholders, influence across functions and lead complex work without formal line-management responsibility.

• Strong analytical, communication and problem-solving capabilities, combined with accountability, ownership, curiosity and a proactive, solution-oriented approach.

• Ability to operate with agility across regional or global environments, navigate ambiguity and complexity, and deliver outcomes with limited direction while driving consistent financial processes and standards.

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion 

Novartis is committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams representative of the patients and communities we serve.

Accessibility and accommodation

Novartis is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, or in order to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an e-mail to [email protected] and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Please include the job requisition number in your message.

Skills Desired

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Building High Performance Team, Capital Allocation, Critical Thinking, Database Normalization, Data Cleansing, Data Visualization, Financial Management Reporting, Give Feedback, Insight Generation, Interpersonal Relationships, Key Driver Analysis (KDA), Managing Ambiguity, Market Understanding, Planning Analysis, Post-Merger Integrations (PMI), Problem Solving, Process Optimization, Stakeholder Influence