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

Determining compensation for this role (and others) at Highspring depends upon a wide array of factors including but not limited to the individual’s skill sets, experience and training, licensure and certifications, office location and other geographic considerations, as well as other business and organizational needs. With that said, as required by local law, Highspring believes that the following salary range reasonably estimates the base compensation for an individual hired into this position in geographies that require salary range disclosure to be between the range below.The individual may also be eligible for a variety of bonus and financial incentives based on individual and company performance.

Base Compensation Range

$114,886—$177,397 USD

EEO Notice

Highspring is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race (including but not limited to traits historically associated with race such as hair texture and hair style), color, sex (includes pregnancy or related conditions), religion or creed, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, status as a veteran, union membership, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, political affiliation, or any other protected characteristics as required by federal, state or local law.

Highspring and its parents, affiliates, and subsidiaries are committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Highspring and its parents, affiliates, and subsidiaries will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact [email protected].

Highspring also wants all applicants to know their rights that workplace discrimination is illegal.

Privacy Notice

Highspring and its parents, affiliates, and subsidiaries (“we,” “our,” or “Highspring”) respects your privacy and are committed to providing transparent notice of our policies.

• California residents may access Highspring HR Notice at Collection for California Applicants and Employees here.
• Virginia residents may access our state specific policies here.
• Residents of all other states may access our policies here.
• Canadian residents may access our policies in English here  and in French here.
• Residents of countries governed by GDPR may access our policies here.

Additionally, submissions to this position are subject to the use of AI to perform preliminary candidate screenings, focused on ensuring minimum job requirements noted in the position are satisfied. More details about Highspring’s use of AI can be found here (https://www.highspring.com/ai-use-notices/). Further assessment of candidates beyond this initial phase will be conducted by recruiters and hiring managers.