Manager, Strategy & Transformation (Merger Transformation)

The Team

Join a team of talented professionals with deep business and finance transformation experience who guide clients through major transactions, including M&A, carve-outs, IPOs, system implementations, and organizational change. We help organizations define business strategy and execute transformation initiatives across operational accounting, financial process improvement, financial technology enablement, FP&A, liquidity and cash reporting, regulatory reporting, risk management, and transactions.

Your Impact

This role flexes between two modes of work, sometimes simultaneously across different portfolios:

• One-time facilitation and mapping engagements: parachuting into a portfolio or cross-portfolio topic to run a focused workshop (e.g., process mapping, journey mapping, current-state/future-state discovery), produce a clear artifact, and hand off findings and recommendations.
• End-to-end journey or workstream ownership: picking up and managing a cross-portfolio journey or initiative from discovery through execution, including planning, stakeholder management, and driving it to completion.

The successful candidate will move fluidly between these modes - sometimes running a single two-hour workshop, other times carrying a multi-month workstream - and will know how to prioritize and sequence their own time accordingly.

What You'll Do

Cross-Portfolio Mapping & Facilitation

• Design, plan, and independently facilitate workshops (process mapping, journey mapping, current-state/future-state, root-cause, and requirements sessions) with minimal supervision, driving groups to a clear, documented outcome.
• Build and maintain process flow diagrams and end-to-end journey maps that connect activities, systems, and handoffs across multiple portfolios and lines of business.
• Identify where portfolio-level work creates gaps, redundancies, or conflicting decisions in a shared process, function, or customer/employee experience, and escalate or resolve them.
• Translate workshop output into clear artifacts (maps, decision logs, action plans, RAID logs) that portfolio and program leads can act on without needing the facilitator in the room.

Program & Project Delivery

• Where assigned to own an end-to-end journey or workstream, build the plan, sequence the work, and tactically execute with limited day-to-day direction.
• Apply program/project management discipline (scope, milestones, dependencies, RAID, status reporting) to cross-portfolio initiatives that don't sit neatly inside a single portfolio's existing governance.
• Manage a variable workload - balancing standalone facilitation requests against longer-running workstream ownership - and proactively flag capacity conflicts rather than absorbing them silently.

Relationship & Stakeholder Management

• Build trust quickly with portfolio leads, project teams, and subject matter experts who may not have worked with this person before and did not ask for the engagement.
• Ask questions and probe assumptions without being told to - surfacing risks or gaps that portfolio-level teams, focused on their own scope, may not see.
• Communicate findings and recommendations in a way that lands with both working teams and senior stakeholders.

Your Experience

Minimum Qualifications

• BA/BS in Business, Finance, Accounting, Information Systems, Operations, or related discipline
• 5+ years of experience in banking, financial services consulting, business transformation, or a related environment

• Prior experience as a business analyst, or deep familiarity building and reading process flow diagrams and journey maps.
• Prior experience as a project manager or program manager, or clearly demonstrated equivalent skills (planning, dependency management, status reporting, driving work to completion).
• Proven ability to independently design and facilitate workshops - particularly process mapping and journey mapping sessions - and drive groups to a decision or clear next step.
• Demonstrated ability to both set strategy/plan with minimal support and tactically execute that plan personally.
• Strong interpersonal skills; able to build credibility and trust quickly with people meeting them for the first time.
• Demonstrated subject matter expertise across multiple banking, financial services, or transformation domains
• Ability to take an ambiguous client problem, structure the approach, lead a team through the analysis, and develop an executable solution
• Strong executive communication skills with the ability to synthesize complex issues into clear recommendations, tradeoffs, and decisions
• Demonstrated ability to manage and develop junior team members while maintaining accountability for quality and outcomes
• Comfort operating in fast-moving environments where priorities, requirements, and available information may evolve
• Strong Microsoft Office experience (PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook)
• Willingness to travel at least 25%
• Flexibility to be onsite with clients or in Highspring office up to 3 days/week

Preferred Qualifications

• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt or Black Belt certification, or equivalent process-improvement experience.
• Prior management consulting experience.
• Experience leading workstreams within a bank merger, acquisition integration, core banking conversion, regulatory transformation, or enterprise-wide change program
• Experience working with banks experiencing significant growth, increasing organizational complexity, or preparing to cross regulatory asset thresholds
• Experience helping financial institutions enhance operating models, governance, risk management, controls, data, reporting, technology, or business capabilities as organizational and regulatory expectations increase
• Experience leading initiatives that require close coordination between business and technology teams
• MBA or relevant advanced degree or professional certification