Procurement Manager

Crown Agents Bank is a vastly growing and regulated UK bank that connects emerging and frontier markets to the rest of the world, using FX and payments technology. We are transforming the way payments and FX move through emerging markets, reducing friction so that more money gets to those who need it. Emerging markets payments are usually challenging, expensive, unreliable and opaque. Our solutions help fix these pain points. Ultimately, we connect traditionally hard-to-reach regions to global financial infrastructure, giving access to the best prices and the fastest, most reliable settlement.

FX and cross-border payments are often complex and expensive, especially when operating in emerging markets. Crown Agents Bank (CAB) wraps its deep and trusted relationships and strength of network around innovative digital capabilities, and cross-border transaction banking solutions to enable fintech, corporates, governments, development organisations and banks to move money to, from, and across often hard-to-reach markets.

Role Purpose:

• Responsible for end-to-end strategic sourcing and contracting across assigned indirect spend categories, ensuring the Bank secures best value, fit for purpose suppliers and robust commercial agreements that support business outcomes and delivery timelines.

• Leads competitive sourcing activity (including “net new” and renewal/recurring engagements), shaping sourcing strategies, running structured tender processes, and negotiating contracts (including appropriate service levels, governance, risk protections and exit provisions) in partnership with Service Owners, Legal and relevant risk/control teams.

• Operating within a regulated financial services environment, the role ensures sourcing and contracting activity is delivered in line with internal procurement frameworks and the Bank’s obligations relating to outsourcing and third party risk management, operational resilience, auditability, and ethical/sustainable procurement.

Sourcing Strategy & Category Planning

• Develop and maintain category sourcing strategies for assigned indirect spend areas, informed by business demand, supplier market dynamics, cost drivers, and risk considerations.

• Build multi year pipelines of “net new”, renewal and optimisation opportunities; identify initiatives to deliver measurable value (commercial benefit, risk reduction, operational simplification).

• Provide proactive market insight (benchmarking, supplier innovation, emerging risks such as concentration risk) and brief stakeholders with clear options and recommendations.

End to End Sourcing Delivery

• Lead structured sourcing events (RFI/RFP/RFQ, evaluation, negotiation, award), ensuring a transparent, fair and well documented process with a clear audit trail.

• Define commercial models, pricing constructs and contractual mechanisms (e.g., indexation controls, usage bands, service credits, gainshare where appropriate) to optimise value over the contract lifecycle.

Contracting, Governance & Regulatory Alignment

• Negotiate and deliver contracts that are fit for a regulated bank, ensuring contractual provisions support operational resilience and third party risk expectations (e.g., clear service definitions, data protection/security obligations, access/audit rights, sub contracting controls, incident obligations, BCP/DR, and exit/transition provisions).

• Work with the Procurement Vendor Governance function, Service Owners, Information Security and SMEs to ensure risk assessment and due diligence outputs are appropriately reflected in contract schedules and obligations.

• Ensure sourcing activity follows internal frameworks (Sourcing Management Framework, Sustainable Procurement Policy, Outsourcing & Third Party Risk policy), including correct routing, approvals and records management.

• Support remediation of legacy contracts where required by updated regulatory expectations at renewal or material change points (working with Legal and stakeholders to prioritise and sequence).

Stakeholder Partnership & Decision Support

• Act as a trusted commercial advisor to stakeholders, shaping requirements early, challenging “must haves” vs “nice to haves”, and ensuring sourcing approach is proportionate to risk and spend.

• Facilitate cross functional alignment across Finance, Legal, Technology, Risk/Compliance and InfoSec to remove blockers and drive timely decisions.

• Prepare concise sourcing papers (options, evaluation outcomes, commercial justification, key risks) suitable for senior approval forums in line with authority levels.

Supplier Handover & Lifecycle Readiness

• Deliver a disciplined handover from contract execution into ongoing vendor governance / relationship management, ensuring service owners and vendor managers have what they need to manage performance, risk, renewals and obligations.

• Ensure contract artefacts, key metadata and obligations are stored and indexed appropriately to support auditability and ongoing management (with Procurement maintaining central contract records.

Cost Optimisation, MI & Continuous Improvement

• Monitor and analyse spend and supplier performance trends to identify savings, demand management and rationalisation opportunities without compromising service quality or control.

• Support procurement MI (pipeline, cycle times, savings, contractual protections embedded, renewals forward view) and contribute to continuous improvement of sourcing processes, templates and toolsets (including automation where appropriate).

• Promote ethical conduct, sustainability and supplier standards in line with the Sustainable Procurement Policy and Vendor Code of Conduct expectations.

Qualification

• Educated to Degree level or equivalent.

Experience

• Extensive experience in procurement and sourcing. Can demonstrate a track record of delivering contract negotiations, cost savings and strategic sourcing initiatives in a high growth environment.
• Must have held a previous sourcing role and be able to demonstrate a strong track record of working and communicating effectively across the breadth and depth of an organisation.
• 5+ years of experience in procurement, sourcing, contract negotiation and vendor management within financial services or a similar regulated environment.
• Hands on with the ability to balance essential functions while building out processes to embed over in time.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal, negotiation and influencing skills with the ability to build and maintain relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
• Good leadership and influencing capabilities. Can cite specific examples of influencing technical and business management decisions to the benefit of the company.
• Ability to work and deliver under pressure.
• Ability to prioritise quickly and effectively in difficult situations.
• Ability to install confidence in internal and external stakeholders.
• Ability to remain calm, communicate effectively and motivate team members and stakeholders in high pressure situations.
  
  

• Hybrid working
• Contributory personal pension plan: - Minimum: Employee 2% and Employer 7%. Employer matches contributions in 1% increments to a maximum of: Employee 5% and Employer 10%
• Life Assurance – 4 times annual salary
• Group Income Protection
• Private Medical Insurance – this may include cover for partner and or children at company cost. Cover includes Optical, Dental and Audiology
• Discretionary Bonus
• Competitive Annual Leave
• 2 Volunteering Days
• Benefit Hub