Head of Finance

Bullfinch Recruitment is excited to be partnering with a client to recruit a Head of Finance to be based in Malta.

This is the number one finance seat in the business. You will be the first senior finance hire, you will build the finance function from a blank page, and you will own the financial narrative that goes to our Board, our regulator, our banking and scheme partners and our shareholders.

It suits someone who has held a senior finance role in a licensed payments, e-money or fintech business and now wants to build one properly — with the mandate, the budget and the seniority to do it their way. The role is positioned as CFO-designate: we expect the successful candidate to grow into the Chief Financial Officer title as the business scales beyond launch.

You will sit on the senior management team alongside the Chief Risk Officer, the Head of Payments Operations and our technology leadership, and will work closely with our Non-Executive and Independent Non-Executive Directors.

You will inherit the finance agenda in full and build the team beneath you:

• Year 1: you own the function personally, supported by outsourced payroll, external auditors, tax advisers and our Malta legal and company secretarial advisers.

• Year 2: you recruit and lead a Financial Controller and a Treasury & Reconciliation Officer.

• Beyond: you shape the function — reporting, treasury, FP&A and commercial finance — as volumes grow.

Key responsibilitiesFinancial control and reporting

• Own the accounting function end to end: general ledger, month-end close, management accounts and the annual statutory financial statements under IFRS.

• Establish the finance policies, controls, delegated authorities and segregation of duties appropriate to a regulated payments business, and document them to a standard that stands up to audit and regulatory inspection.

• Manage the relationship with our external auditors and deliver a clean first statutory audit.

• Select and implement the finance systems — accounting platform, expense management, payroll interface and reporting layer — and integrate them with the payments platform.

Regulatory and capital

• Own the preparation and submission of financial regulatory returns to the MFSA, to deadline and without correction.

• Monitor and report own funds and capital adequacy against the applicable requirement, with forward-looking headroom analysis presented to the Board.

• Work with the Chief Risk Officer and Compliance on the financial elements of our regulatory obligations, including the capital and liquidity adequacy assessment, recovery and wind-down planning, and the financial inputs to the business plan.

• Act as finance's point of contact in supervisory engagement, and prepare the financial sections of Board and regulatory reporting packs.

Safeguarding and treasury

• Own the safeguarding framework for relevant customer funds: account structure, daily reconciliation, exception handling, attestation and the reporting that evidences it.

• Design and operate the daily and intraday reconciliation between the payments platform, scheme and processor settlement files, safeguarding accounts and the ledger.

• Manage liquidity, settlement funding, corporate banking relationships and FX exposure across the currencies we settle in.

• Build the treasury operating model that will later be run by the Treasury & Reconciliation Officer, and retain accountability for it.

Planning, analysis and commercial finance

• Own the financial model, the annual budget and the rolling forecast, and hold the business accountable to them.

• Build the unit economics the business runs on: revenue per transaction by service line, interchange and scheme cost, processor and acquirer cost, take rate, and contribution margin by merchant and by vertical.

• Provide commercial finance support on merchant pricing, partner and referral economics, scheme sponsorship arrangements and new product cases.

• Deliver the management information the Board and shareholders need: clear, on time, and consistent between the model, the accounts and the regulatory returns.

Tax, corporate and governance

• Manage Maltese corporate tax and VAT compliance, transfer pricing where relevant, and the group's tax position with our external advisers.

• Support intragroup arrangements, recharges and corporate governance requirements alongside our company secretarial advisers.

• Prepare Board and Audit Committee materials and present at Board meetings.

Experience & QualificationsEssential

• A qualified accountant — ACA, ACCA, CPA or equivalent.

• Senior finance experience (Head of Finance, Financial Controller stepping up, Finance Director or CFO) in a regulated financial services business — payment institution, e-money institution, acquirer, PSP or a comparably regulated fintech.

• Direct, hands-on experience of safeguarding of relevant funds and settlement reconciliation in a payments environment. This is the single most important technical requirement of the role.

• Working knowledge of the regulatory framework applying to payment institutions — PSD2 and its Maltese implementation, own funds and capital requirements, and financial regulatory reporting.

• Demonstrated ownership of a statutory audit and IFRS financial statements.

• Strong financial modelling and analytical capability, and the judgement to know when the model is wrong.

• The credibility and communication skills to present to a Board, a regulator, an auditor and a banking partner — and to be believed by all four.

• Based in Malta, or willing and able to relocate to Malta before starting. This role cannot be performed remotely: it requires genuine presence in our Malta office and local availability to the Board and the regulator.

• Fluent written and spoken English.

• The successful candidate must be able to satisfy the MFSA's fit-and-proper standards, which will be confirmed as part of the appointment process.

Desirable

• Experience of taking a payments or e-money business through a licence application, or through the first year of operating under a new authorisation.

• Familiarity with card scheme settlement, interchange, scheme fees and acquirer or sponsored-BIN economics.

• Experience building a finance team from the first hire, in a business scaling from pre-revenue to material volume.

• Maltese tax and VAT knowledge, and existing relationships in the Malta financial services market.

• Exposure to merchant-of-record structures, payment orchestration, or higher-risk merchant verticals.