The Autumn Finance Hiring Window
Finance recruitment has a shape to its year, and the autumn is the busiest and most compressed part of it. Between the first week of September and the middle of December there is a window in which most of the year’s remaining permanent finance appointments …
What an Unfilled Finance Seat Actually Costs
A vacant finance role is one of the few business costs that does not appear anywhere in the management accounts. The salary line shows a saving. The recruitment budget is untouched. Nothing in the reporting says the seat is empty — which is precisely why …
Why Your Financial Controller Search Has Stalled
A finance search that has been open for three months is rarely stalled for the reason the business thinks it is. The usual explanation offered is that “there is nobody out there” — and while candidate scarcity is real in some disciplines, it is the …
Senior Finance Manager to SMF16/17: What to Ask
A growing number of the Senior Finance Manager and Financial Controller briefs we handle at Accountancy Capital now carry the same feature: the role is advertised as a stepping stone to a Senior Management Function, usually SMF16 (Compliance Oversight) or SMF17 (Money Laundering Reporting Officer), …
Consumer Duty Two Years On: What Finance Teams Learned
It is two years since the Consumer Duty extended to closed products and services, and roughly three since it first applied. Long enough for firms to have produced several annual board reports, been through supervisory engagement, and discovered where their arrangements were weaker than they …
Why Regulated-Firm Finance Roles Pay a Premium
A Financial Controller in an FCA-authorised firm typically earns ten to twenty per cent more than one doing comparable work in a commercial business of the same size. The gap is not a market quirk and it has not compressed in the years I have …
Pricing Your Fractional Finance Work: A Practical Guide
Pricing is the part of fractional practice that finance professionals handle worst, which is an irony worth noting. People who spend their working lives on margin analysis routinely set their own rate by taking their former salary, dividing by 220 and adding a bit — …
Becoming a Fractional Financial Controller: A Guide
Fractional financial control has become a genuine career rather than a stopgap between permanent roles. Businesses between roughly £3m and £30m increasingly want senior finance capability one or two days a week, and the experienced Financial Controllers who serve them can build a portfolio that …
What a Fractional FC Achieves in the First 90 Days
Businesses engaging a fractional Financial Controller for the first time usually have a clear problem — the numbers are late, or not trusted, or nobody senior is accountable for them — and much less clarity about what should actually change and how quickly. That vagueness …
The Regulated Finance Hiring Market: H2 2026
Finance hiring inside FCA-authorised firms behaves differently from the wider qualified market. The pools are smaller, the premiums are structural rather than cyclical, and demand is driven by regulatory obligation as much as by growth — which means it holds up in conditions where commercial …
