Senior Finance Manager

About Ryft Ryft is a regulated payment facilitator and authorised payment institution building the infrastructure layer for modern commerce platforms. We enable marketplaces, SaaS platforms and multi-party ecosystems to embed and monetise payments natively. Our technology handles onboarding, compliance, orchestration, split payments and revenue sharing, allowing our partners to focus on growth while we manage complexity. We are now entering the next phase of scale, expanding into new verticals and building a category-defining embedded payments platform. About the role This is a hands-on Senior Finance Manager role within a fast-growing finance team at an FCA-regulated payments business. Reporting to the Financial Controller and leading a team of two, you will own the monthly close and the integrity of the balance sheet and take day-to-day responsibility for how the finance team runs. A significant part of this role is being involved in building the processes that do not exist yet and automating the ones that still rely on manual effort. This suits a fully qualified accountant who has already owned a month-end close in their own right and wants to step up into genuine team leadership - someone comfortable in the detail, working at pace, in a business whose volumes and complexity are growing quickly. Key responsibilities - Month-end close and management reporting - Own the month-end timetable end to end, maintaining a disciplined and efficient close as transaction volumes and complexity grow - Prepare and review the monthly management accounts pack, ready for review by the Financial Controller and Finance Director - Review the journals, accruals, prepayments and reconciliations prepared by the team, taking responsibility for the accuracy of what is issued - Take full ownership of balance sheet integrity, ensuring accounts are reconciled monthly, reconciling items are resolved promptly and appropriate review controls are maintained - Work closely with our client funds and reconciliations team, ensuring the positions they produce are reflected correctly and promptly in the ledger Process build, systems and controls - Take ownership of finance processes across the transactional cycle - purchase ledger, sales ledger, expenses and payroll journals - ensuring controls are documented and consistently applied - Design and implement new processes for activities the business has not had to account for before, getting them right at the point of introduction rather than retrofitting them later - Identify and remove manual effort, making the case for change where a process works today but will not scale - Embed scalable financial controls as the business grows, ensuring key processes are appropriately documented, evidenced and reviewable Supporting the wider finance function - Support the Financial Controller on VAT, year-end and audit by providing accurate, reconciled figures and supporting schedules to deadline - As you establish yourself in the role, we expect the remit to broaden, with increasing ownership of areas such as VAT, year-end, audit and other technical accounting matters - Contribute actuals, cost driver insight and practical input to budgeting and forecasting - Escalate technical and judgement-based issues promptly, with a clear recommendation rather than an open question Team leadership and development - Line manage a Management Accountant and an Assistant Management Accountant, review their output, set the standard for quality, and act as the first point of technical escalation before matters reach the Financial Controller - Coach and develop the team, supporting professional study and creating opportunities for them to take on more Skills - must haves - Fully qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA or CIMA) with a strong technical accounting foundation - Demonstrable ownership of a month-end close and a management accounts pack in their own right, not solely preparing components of someone else's - Strong balance sheet discipline, with real experience owning reconciliations and driving breaks to resolution - Line management experience, or clear readiness for it - able to review others work - Experience in a high-volume transactional environment, comfortable working with large data sets and reconciling between systems - Strong Excel skills and confidence with cloud accounting systems - Process-minded and hands-on - comfortable getting into the detail, identifying processes that will not scale, and implementing practical solutions rather than simply highlighting problems Skills - nice to have - Payments, fintech or other FCA-regulated financial services experience - Hands-on involvement in systems implementation and change What We Offer - A genuinely developmental Senior Finance Manager role - you'll take ownership of the day-to-day finance operation from the outset, with the opportunity to broaden your remit into technical accounting and other areas as the business scales - A chance to shape the future of payments at a high-growth fintech - Hybrid working from our Manchester office and flexible hours - Meaningful equity options - 25 days holiday + bank holidays - Regular team socials and offsites - A fast-paced working environment with genuine responsibility and autonomy