Sr. Manager, Collections & Partnerships

Role Purpose: The Global Customer Financial Operations is a hybrid shared services organization that oversees the global order-to-cash functions for the NBCUniversal Media LLC company, which include Ad Sales, TV Distribution, Universal Pictures International, Universal Products & Experiences, and many other major divisions. The mission of GCFO is to facilitate sales, accelerate cash flow, mitigate risk, and provide customer service excellence. The Senior Manager, Customer Financial Partnerships is the lead customer liaison on behalf of GCFO with both external advertising agencies or clients-direct and internal Sales leadership and manages a large and diverse accounts receivable portfolio with a client-focus mindset on achieving optimal customer on-boarding experience, credit evaluation, collections, and dispute management. This role is responsible for performing complex credit evaluations and decisioning on new and existing customers. The successful candidate will have strong relationship building skills with the ability to negotiate and persuade, when necessary, has the ability to work independently as well as part of a large global team. In addition, this candidate will have a team-first mindset, with a desire to ensure alignment with your cross-functional colleagues, and a natural curiosity to getting answers to questions, especially through data analysis. The ideal candidate will be detail-oriented, with a solid working knowledge of billing, cash applications, credit rules and policy, collections, and internal controls. Additionally, this individual must thrive on process improvement and enjoy working in a challenging, fast-paced environment. Responsibilities: Manage and drive performance of up to two managers. The Sr. Manager is accountable for ensuring the integrity of active customer master data and compliance of AML/KYC policies. Manage customer account portfolio to continually achieve operational excellence and drive continuous improvement for collections, customer service and process improvements. Perform due diligence to ensure compliance to NBCU’s liability, billing, or payment terms. Facilitate sales through creative and collaborative solutioning with Sales and Legal. Identify, recommend and support optimization efforts through continuous improvements and technology enabled solutions (e.g. RPA). Participate in process automation projects by assisting with analysis, UAT testing, communicating results. Grow customer relationships externally and internally with all levels of inter-dependent order-to-cash teams. Collaborate with cross functional stakeholders and BPO to enhance Credit & Collection strategies, improve collection processes, resolve disputes and customer service issues to help ensure high-performance outcome. Collaborate with the Credit Risk Team on performing financial and credit analysis regarding new customer applications, past due accounts, high risk customers and other financial impact areas. Perform data analytics and present key business insights to influence customer and sales leadership on process improvements to effect efficiencies and provide better customer experience. Ability to think strategically, act operationally, manage risk and align future direction with priorities. Align with Sales Partnership teams in developing plans to effectively resolve collection matters or in defense of special credit terms while preserving customer relationship. Develop collections strategy leveraging predictive analytics, credit risks scores, and historical data to proactively achieve optimal collections on vast portfolio. Prepare monthly cash forecasts and variance analysis. Obtain customer payment commitments and identify root cause of issue impeding collections. Timely resolve complex disputes with cross-functional teams. Provide exceptional customer service and timeliness when addressing inquiries. Combine the ability to “get into the weeds” and partnerships with management team in developing best-in-class strategies for the organization. Lead BPO in researching and resolving cash application queries and reconciling cash-in-advance accounts. Assist with upskilling and hands on coaching. Contribute to the department through thought-leadership; be an active participant in internal education and opportunities to improve process and/or system efficiencies. Ability to analyze financial data and prepare financial reconciliations schedules.