Director – Financial Planning and Analysis

Company description

At Publicis Health, we believe keeping the world healthy is our most extraordinary social endeavor. Because one person’s wellbeing is the responsibility of the many. As part of Publicis Groupe and built on the world’s foremost intelligence platform, we create sharper, more memorable, and valuable brands for better outcomes. Powered by more than 8,000 healthcare communications, data, and medical specialists, our global agency collective is at the heart of international health communications. We Make Health Happen. For more information, visit us at www.publicishealth.com.

Overview

The Director is the primary FP&A partner to the CFO of Health and leads the team supporting Health consolidation and agency FP&A. The Director owns the consolidated financial view and story of Health, translating performance, forecasts, workforce trends, risks, and opportunities into clear insights and recommendations.

The role combines strong financial execution with forward-looking decision support. The Director ensures that core planning, consolidation, workforce, bonus, and severance processes are well managed, while helping the CFO evaluate how headcount, staff costs, productivity, and capacity should align with revenue and business demand. The Director leads the team responsible for the underlying work and remains accountable for the quality and delivery of its outputs.

What Success Looks Like

• Earns the confidence of the CFO of Health as a trusted FP&A partner who provides reliable execution, clear analysis, and practical recommendations.
• Delivers one cohesive financial story for Health, connecting current performance with the future outlook, key business drivers, risks, and opportunities.
• Ensures core FP&A processes and outputs are accurate, timely, well controlled, and appropriately owned across the team.
• Provides clear access to whether headcount, staff costs, efficiency, and capacity are aligned with revenue and changing business needs.  
• Builds productive relationships with the Heads of Finance while constructively challenging assumptions and surfacing issues early.
• Develops a capable FP&A team that independently accomplishes its responsibilities and increasingly focuses on analysis and business partnership.  
• Improves the efficiency and scalability of Health FP&A through clearer ownership, standardization, automation, and effective use of technology.

Responsibilities

Core Accountabilities

1. Strategic Partner to the CFO of Health

• Serve as the CFO’s primary FP&A partner, developing a strong understanding of business priorities, key decisions, and financial information needs.

• Translate financial and operating information into a clear view of performance, outlook, risks, opportunities, trade-offs, and recommended actions.

• Support decisions involving growth, margin, costs, workforce, productivity, investment, restructuring, and organizational capacity.

• Anticipate questions and emerging issues and direct the analysis needed to help the CFO evaluate potential actions.

• Drive appropriate follow-through on finance-supported decisions and commitments across the Health organization.

2. Health Financial View and Business Insight

• Own the consolidated FP&A view and financial story for Health across approximately six agency brands.

• Integrate agency forecasts, business drivers, and operating perspectives into a cohesive view of current performance and future outlook.

• Maintain a strong understanding of the drivers behind revenue, pipeline, headcount, staff costs, productivity, utilization, overhead, margin, client profitability, and working capital.

• Identify patterns, inconsistencies, and emerging risks within agency forecasts and management assumptions.

• Ensure material risks and opportunities are quantified, monitored, and appropriately reflected in the Health outlook.

• Shape business reviews, executive materials, and ad hoc analyses around the implications and decisions most relevant to the CFO.

3. Forward-Looking Decision Support and Workforce Planning

• Lead scenario analysis across revenue, staffing, compensation, productivity, utilization, client activity, investment, and restructuring.

• Connect headcount and staff-cost trends with revenue, pipeline, workload, and expected business demand.

• Provide clear analytical views of whether staffing levels and organizational capacity are adjusting appropriately as the business changes.

• Partner with Resource Management and the Heads of Finance to identify capacity constraints, excess capacity, productivity opportunities, and potential resource shifts.

• Evaluate the financial and operational implications of hiring, attrition, severance, restructuring, and redeployment of personnel.

• Monitor the outcomes of workforce decisions and provide insight into whether expected financial and productivity benefits are being realized.

• Bring the CFO practical recommendations and clearly articulated trade-offs rather than only explaining historical results.

4. Finance and Business Partnerships

• Build strong working relationships with the five Heads of Finance, earning the trust required to obtain high-quality information, challenge assumptions, and surface issues early.

• Hold constructive discussions about forecast quality, business performance, workforce assumptions, and proposed actions while maintaining productive relationships.

• Partner with Resource Management, Talent, Operations, New Business, and other functions when decisions require coordinated financial and operational action.

• Maintain effective relationships with Accounting, Client Finance, Finance Systems, Treasury, Tax, and other specialist teams whose work affects Health’s financial performance.

• Represent the consolidated Health perspective while recognizing relevant differences across agency business models and circumstances.

5. Leadership of the Health FP&A Team

• Lead an FP&A team of approximately seven professionals supporting Health consolidation and agency FP&A.

• Establish clear roles, priorities, deliverables, timelines, review points, workflows, and analytical standards across the team.

• Create an integrated operating model across consolidation and agency FP&A, with clear ownership and effective coordination between the teams.

• Delegate recurring preparation, calculations, reconciliations, and analysis to the appropriate team members while retaining accountability for the team’s final outputs.

• Ensure the team consistently delivers accurate forecasts, budgets, actuals analysis, management reporting, workforce analysis, and executive materials.

• Develop team members beyond report preparation toward analytical judgment, business understanding, clear communication, and proactive decision support.

• Evaluate workload, capacity, role clarity, and development needs, placing work at the appropriate level and avoiding unnecessary reliance on the Director for routine preparation or checking.

6. Financial Execution, Rigor, and Governance

• Lead the Health consolidation, forecasting, budgeting, and management reporting processes.

• Ensure agency submissions are complete, accurate, timely, appropriately supported, and aligned with the consolidated Health outlook.

• Review and challenge forecasts and key assumptions before they are incorporated into the Health financial view.

• Maintain command of the underlying financial information and ensure discrepancies between agency submissions, source systems, consolidation tools, and management reporting are resolved.

• Own the Health pillar’s bonus and severance planning, forecasting, tracking, and reporting processes.

• Establish clear team ownership for the underlying bonus and severance calculations, schedules, reconciliations, and analysis while retaining accountability for the accuracy and timely delivery of the final outputs.

• Provide the CFO with clear insight into bonus and severance assumptions, forecast movements, financial implications, risks, and opportunities.

• Maintain appropriate review processes, documentation, controls, and handling of sensitive workforce-related financial information.

• Apply a sound understanding of accounting and financial reporting when evaluating results, unusual items, forecast implications, and business decisions.

7. Future-Ready FP&A

• Find opportunities to standardize, simplify, automate, or eliminate repetitive work across Health FP&A.

• Redirect team capacity from report production and manual reconciliation toward analysis, forecasting, and decision support.

• Promote effective use of planning, consolidation, reporting, analytics, CRM, and ERP platforms.

• Use AI and automation responsibly to support repeatable analysis, commentary, data validation, workflow management, and insight generation, with appropriate review and controls.

• Lead Health-level process, reporting, and operating-model improvements while aligning material investments or broader changes with the FP&A Lead, Intelligent Creativity.

• Support common FP&A standards while ensuring the specific analytical and decision-support needs of the Health organization are addressed.

Qualifications

Experience and Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in FP&A, commercial finance, operational finance, or a related finance discipline within a complex, multi-business environment.
• Demonstrated experience as a strategic partner to a CFO or comparable senior finance leader.
• Strong command of planning, forecasting, consolidation, budgeting, performance management, workforce planning, scenario analysis, and executive decision support.
• Experience connecting headcount, staff costs, productivity, utilization, and organizational capacity with revenue and business demand.
• Experience overseeing bonus, severance, compensation, or other workforce-related financial planning processes.
• Experience leading and developing FP&A professionals across centralized and business-embedded roles.
• Strong analytical judgment, with the ability to translate financial and operating information into clear insights, implications, and recommendations.
• Ability to constructively challenge finance and business leaders while building credible and productive relationships.
• Ability to delegate detailed work while maintaining appropriate oversight and accountability for team outputs.
• Advanced Excel capabilities and practical experience with enterprise planning, consolidation, reporting, and data-visualization platforms.
• Experience with Hyperion/HFM, Essbase, SmartView, SAP, Salesforce, Power BI, Pigment, or similar platforms is preferred.
• Experience using AI or automation to improve FP&A analysis, reporting, validation, or workflows is preferred.
• Experience in advertising, media, marketing services, professional services, healthcare communications, or another people-based and project-based industry is strongly preferred.
• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, Business, or a related field. An advanced degree or relevant professional certification is a plus.

Additional information

Our Publicis Groupe motto “Viva La Différence” means we’re better together, and we believe that our differences make us stronger. It means we honor and celebrate all identities, across all facets of intersectionality, and it underpins all that we do as an organization. We are focused on fostering belonging and creating equitable & inclusive experiences for all talent.

Publicis Groupe provides robust and inclusive benefit programs and policies to support the evolving and diverse needs of our talent and enable every person to grow and thrive. Our benefits package includes medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401K, as well as parental and family care leave, family forming assistance, tuition reimbursement, and flexible time off.

If you require accommodation or assistance with the application or onboarding process specifically, please contact [email protected].

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

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Compensation Range: USD $121,315.00 - USD $194,220.00/Annually. This is the pay range the Company believes it will pay for this position at the time of this posting. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time. Temporary roles may be eligible to participate in our freelancer/temporary employee medical plan through a third-party benefits administration system once certain criteria have been met. For regular roles, the Company will offer medical coverage, dental, vision, disability, 401k, and paid time off. The Company anticipates the application deadline for this job posting will be 11/23/2026.