Leading early discovery

Once the work is won, you lead the front end: the discovery, the diagnostic, the visioning and the early design where the decisions that shape everything downstream get made. You run those phases in front of the client, setting the agenda, chairing the senior sessions, and standing as the finance design authority. You make the calls that hold the shape of the solution together, and you take the client's leadership to a decision they'll stand behind. You hand over to delivery with a defined scope, an agreed design direction and a client that knows what it has signed up to. You stay close enough to protect the relationship and the commercial position as the programme runs.

SAP Business AI in the conversation

AI is now part of every serious SAP finance discussion, and you need to hold that part of it in front of a client's finance leadership. You can talk about SAP Business AI and Joule: what is shipping today, what is still roadmap, and what that difference means for a client putting a programme behind it. You can hold the same conversation on agentic AI in and around finance processes: where an agent can credibly run a close task or a reconciliation, what that does to controls and evidence, and where a person still has to own the judgement. You can speak to how frontier AI capability outside the SAP stack interacts with an SAP landscape, and give a client a straight read on what that combination is good for today. In a pursuit, that shows up in what AI changes about the scope, the design and the value case, and in what it leaves untouched. It shows up in the room too, because a CFO or a CIO will test you on it and you need to come through that with your credibility intact. You won't be asked to build any of it yourself; the bar here is judgement and fluency, not engineering. We're also increasingly an AI-first firm in how we work ourselves, with agentic tooling and orchestration in diagnostics, value-case modelling and pursuit shaping, and our people owning the judgement and the outcome. If you already sell and shape that way, that's a real plus.

Building the capability behind the work

You also build the capability that has to be ready when the deals land. You attract senior people into the SAP finance team and grow the bench behind the work you win, you pull colleagues into the pursuits you shape so the capability deepens across the team, and you coach the managers and senior managers coming up behind you. You treat market eminence as a commercial instrument. A clear, public point of view on where SAP finance transformation is heading, voiced at events, in writing and in front of clients, generates the inbound conversations a pipeline like this is built from.

Who you are

You are at your best in front of a client. You open doors, building senior relationships from a standing start and turning them into business. You decide with incomplete information and carry the consequences. You can look at an opportunity, judge honestly whether it is real, and say no to a client and to your own organisation when the answer is no. You hold a position under pressure from a client executive who would rather hear something else, because being trusted is worth more to you than being agreeable. You carry commercial risk calmly, and you're candid upstream early when something you own isn't going to land. You communicate without ego. You can chair a room of a client's finance and technology leadership, explain a design trade-off to a CFO and to a CIO in the terms each of them cares about, and disagree without losing the relationship. And you build around yourself: you back the people you bring through, and you measure yourself on having grown a team that can win work without you in the room.

Things that set strong candidates apart:

• The years you have spent originating, shaping and closing SAP-enabled finance work at deal level, within a broader track record (typically 12+ years) in enterprise finance transformation
• Senior client relationships you have built and can build again
• Experience leading discovery and early design phases on large finance transformation programmes
• Breadth across more than one finance platform, so your advice isn't tied to one product
• The ability to hold a credible conversation with a client's finance leadership about SAP Business AI, Joule and agentic AI in finance, covering what is real today, what is roadmap, and what it means for a programme
• A professional finance or accounting qualification (ACA, ACCA, CIMA or equivalent industry experience)

If you have most of this and the drive to build the rest, we want to hear from you. Tell us what you'd bring.

About Finance RP

Within Accenture, the Finance Reinvention Partner helps clients improve financial performance around the CFO agenda — driving best-in-class performance, and sharper insight and benchmarking across the enterprise. In the UK and Ireland, our Finance RP practice brings together finance strategy and the platforms it runs on, including SAP, Oracle, Workday and EPM.

You'd help lead our Platforms transformation offering within the practice: a growing team taking SAP finance transformation to market, and building AI into how we deliver. SAP is where most of the demand in front of us sits, which is why this role sits at the front of the engagement, close to the clients, the market and the CFO agenda the work serves.

What's in it for you

Alongside a competitive salary and package for an Associate Director (dependent on experience), you'll have an extensive benefits package including 30 days' holiday a year, private medical insurance, and 3 additional days' leave a year for charitable work of your choice.

Accenture is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from all sections of society.

Accenture reserves the right to close the role