Senior Financial Accountant

Job description

LHV Bank Limited is a UK-licensed bank operating across three core business segments: Retail Banking, SME Lending, and Banking Services (BaaS). The bank is a wholly owned subsidiary of LHV Group, a listed financial services provider headquartered in Estonia. LHV Bank operates under a full UK banking licence granted in May 2023. The Bank supports over 200 fintech clients with embedded financial infrastructure, provides retail savings products via digital channels, and offers SME credit solutions across the UK. In line with its regulatory responsibilities and growth ambitions, LHV Bank is committed to maintaining a robust and proportionate financial crime control environment. Expanding our services, LHV Bank now provides personal banking solutions. Our offerings include current accounts with competitive interest rates, fixed-rate bonds for long-term savings, and debit cards. Customers can conveniently access these services through the LHV App, enabling secure account opening and management. **Role Overview** The Senior Financial Accountant is a key member of the UK Finance team with a remit spanning finance operations, financial control and financial reporting. The ideal candidate brings strong accounting expertise, high levels of data and IT literacy, and a sharp focus on quality and control. They will be comfortable operating at pace within a highly regulated environment, with the capability and drive to continuously improve processes as the business scales. **Key Responsibilities** *Financial Controllership & Reporting:* - Act as the Financial Controller’s key partner across financial controllership, supporting finance operations, technical accounting, reporting and tax, and helping drive standards, discipline and continuous improvement. - Take responsibility for executing the majority of month-end and year-end close activities, ensuring outputs are accurate, complete and delivered on time in line with IFRS and regulatory requirements. - Ensure the integrity of the general ledger and chart of accounts, with direct responsibility for balance sheet reconciliations, including bank and key control accounts. - Support the preparation of statutory financial statements and disclosures. - Execute and maintain financial reporting models required for a scaling bank (including IFRS 2, IFRS 9 and IFRS 16), adhering to model risk management requirements, with a strong willingness to deepen technical understanding over time. - Support the external audit process by coordinating and delivering high-quality documentation and analysis, ensuring audit requests are addressed accurately and efficiently. - Assist with internal audit activities, ensuring timely, well-evidenced responses to findings and recommendations. *Finance Operations & Tax:* - Execute a broad range of day-to-day finance operations activities, including Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and cash settlements, ensuring accuracy, timeliness and strong control discipline. - Partner with external advisors on tax compliance and reporting, including corporation tax, VAT partial exemption, R&D tax credits and PAYE Settlement Agreements (PSA). - Ensure all financial operations operate within the Bank’s governance, risk and control framework, maintaining strong oversight of financial data quality and reconciliations. *Controls, Process Optimisation & Governance:* - Design, implement and continuously enhance internal controls to strengthen financial governance and mitigate risk in a high-growth environment. - Proactively identify and deliver process improvements and automation opportunities to enhance efficiency, scalability and reporting accuracy. - Maintain and evolve financial policies and procedures, ensuring alignment with internal governance standards and regulatory expectations. - Collaborate closely with Treasury, Risk, Operations, Product and Technology teams to support cost control, asset capitalisation and other finance-related processes. - Act as a key business partner to Group Finance and UK stakeholders, ensuring alignment, transparency and high-quality financial information flows. *Leadership & Culture:* - Coach and support junior members of the finance team, reinforcing high standards of accuracy, ownership and professionalism. - Foster a culture of accountability, integrity and continuous improvement across all financial control processes. - Embrace and promote the effective use of modern tools, including AI solutions such as ChatGPT and Copilot, demonstrating strong prompt literacy and comfort leveraging technology to improve efficiency, insight and reporting quality. **Requirements:** *Education & Qualifications:* - Qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA, ICAS, CPA or CIMA), or in the final stages of qualification. - 2–5 years’ post-qualification experience (or equivalent practical experience) within banking, financial services or another regulated environment. *Technical & Professional Skills:* - Strong core accounting knowledge with practical experience applying IFRS in a financial reporting environment. - Hands-on experience delivering month-end close, balance sheet reconciliations and financial reporting in a controlled environment. - Exposure to statutory accounts preparation and supporting external audits. - Understanding of UK tax fundamentals (corporation tax, VAT), with experience working alongside external advisors. - Experience working with advanced accountings ledgers (Microsoft Dynamics / Business Central / Navision preferred). - Strong Excel capability and high data literacy, with the ability to interrogate large data sets and improve reporting accuracy and efficiency. - Comfortable leveraging modern tools, including AI solutions such as ChatGPT or similar platforms, with solid prompt-writing skills and a practical mindset toward automation and process optimisation. Exposure to SQL/Python and Atlassian tools would be advantageous. - Strong attention to detail and a clear commitment to quality and control. - Well organised, able to prioritise effectively and deliver to tight deadlines in a fast-paced, regulated environment. - Confident communicator, able to work effectively with Group Finance and cross-functional stakeholders. - Fluent in spoken and written English. **Some of our benefits (only applicable to UK based roles not Internship programmes)** - Competitive salary &lots of opportunities to learn, grow and progress professionally. - Open and inclusive culture. - Hybrid working. - Fantastic offices and great working environment. - Vitality Health Plan (includes private health insurance, travel insurance, gym discounts) - Health cash Plan (Medicash health plan Level 3) - 6% employer pension contribution. - Life assurance – 4 x salary. - Income protection insurance – 75% - 28 days holiday plus 3 additional days, & further days for various key life events as well as the opportunity to sell up to 5 days per calendar year. - Swap public/bank holidays each year for alternative days that align with your personal, cultural, or religious observances. - Enhanced family friendly and family forming policies. - Access to a wide range of retail discounts. - Team Socials.