Senior Finance Manager - Planning

Closing Date: Tuesday 6th October 2026

About the role

The Senior Finance Manager, Planning is a high-profile leadership role within Group FP&A, reporting to the Finance Planning Director. The role plays a critical part in shaping BT’s financial performance by driving the Group’s approach to planning, forecasting, value management and performance insight.

You will own and continuously evolve the frameworks, standards and challenge processes that underpin BT’s planning and performance cycles, ensuring plans, forecasts and outcomes are robust, value-focused and translated into clear executive decisions. Operating across Outlook, Medium Term Planning (MTP), Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) and Monthly Business Reviews (MBRs), you will provide meaningful challenge, insight and intervention to improve Group performance and maximise shareholder value.

Working across all business units and Group functions, you will partner with senior finance leaders, transformation teams and functional stakeholders to identify financial risks and opportunities, assess value drivers, evaluate strategic scenarios and influence decisions at the highest levels of the organisation.

This role requires strong commercial judgement, exceptional stakeholder management skills and the credibility to constructively challenge senior leaders in a complex matrix environment. Beyond delivering planning processes, you will shape the Group’s performance agenda, align leadership teams around critical priorities and ensure financial insight drives action.

As BT continues to evolve its performance management capability, this role will be central to ensuring financial plans and forecasts are not simply consolidated, but actively challenged, understood and converted into practical actions that protect and create value.

What you’ll be doing

• Set and own the Group framework for risks, opportunities, value drivers and performance challenge across the full planning and performance cycle.
• Lead the enterprise performance insight agenda, ensuring senior leaders understand material drivers, choices, trade-offs and required interventions.
• Lead scenario and sensitivity analysis to support senior decisions on risk mitigation, value protection, trade-offs and investment choices.
• Provide independent challenge to Unit value driver plans and forecasts, ensuring assumptions are robust, evidence-based and aligned to Group value creation.
• Own the Planning view of transformation value, including benefits, delivery confidence, dependencies and financial impact across the Group plan.
• Shape senior performance and value insight for QBR and MBR, working with the cycle owner to ensure executive discussions focus on decisions, interventions and outcomes.
• Hold the Group view of agreed performance interventions, ensuring clear ownership, progress, escalation and follow-through across cycles.
• Influence and connect Unit Finance, Group FP&A, Reporting and Transformation teams to create one coherent view of Group performance, risk and value.
• Develop clear recommendations and decision materials for CFO, ExCo and Board-level conversations.
• Lead improvements to Planning processes, tools, methods and dashboards so insight is more consistent, decision-useful and embedded across the business.
• Bring senior judgement, constructive challenge and clear communication to complex, ambiguous and material financial issues.

Essential Skills / Experience

• Significant senior finance experience in a large, complex organisation, with strong post-qualified experience
• Deep understanding of planning, forecasting, performance management, value management and financial governance.
• Proven ability to translate complex and ambiguous financial information into clear executive insight, choices and actions.
• Strong commercial and strategic judgement, with the ability to assess value, risk, opportunity and trade-offs across the Group.

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Credibility to influence and constructively challenge senior stakeholders, including Unit CFO teams and Group leadership audiences.
• Ability to lead through influence across a matrix organisation, creating alignment without relying on direct line authority.
• Experience shaping finance frameworks, standards or capabilities that improve decision quality and performance outcomes.
• Strong communication skills, including preparing concise, decision-useful materials for CFO, ExCo and Board-level stakeholders.
• High standards of accuracy, control and integrity, with the confidence to escalate material issues clearly and early.
• A proactive approach to improving ways of working, embedding change and raising the quality of enterprise performance management.

Our Package

Tailored benefits make a real difference. That’s why we offer a comprehensive range to support your growth, wellbeing, and everyday life. You can design the package to suit you and your lifestyle. Your core benefits include:

• Company car scheme (or cash alternative)
• 15% on target annual bonus
• Private healthcare for you and your family
• Access to an online private GP 24/7 for you and your immediate family
• Market-leading paid carers leave with up to 2 weeks off
• Equalised maternity, paternity, and adoption leave – 18 weeks’ full pay and 8 weeks’ half pay
• Discounted EE and BT products, including mobile and broadband
• Market leading Pension scheme – 5% from you and 10% from us
• Holiday purchase scheme

You can select additional benefits, including healthcare, dental, gym memberships and more when you’re ready.

BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers.

BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive.

Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best.

We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country. Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.