Director, Sustainability Reporting EMEA

at  CocaCola

POSITION OVERVIEW:

In The Coca-Cola Company’s Finance Hub, we are a world-class partner, providing tech-enabled, data-driven insights to our stakeholders, enabling business and operational decision-making. All core processes within the Finance Hub aim to drive improvement to overall shareholder value. As a team, we foster a culture of partnership, integrity, and accountability.
As a Regional Sustainability Reporting Lead within the newly established Global Statutory & Sustainability Reporting Center of Excellence, you will partner with Global Record to Report Service Delivery Senior Directors and their teams to manage compliance metrics for mandatory statutory reporting, ensuring alignment with various global sustainability directives. You will drive seamless collaboration with cross-functional stakeholders to gather, validate, and manage data, while leveraging cutting-edge technology to optimize reporting processes and maintain top-tier data quality. This role positions you as a key player within the Finance Hub-Financial Operations Service Delivery organization, where you will support regulatory compliance, manage escalations, and champion the evolution of sustainability reporting from transition to transformation.

EXPERIENCE:

• 8+ years of experience in Finance including with a geographical work scope, involving financial and/or management accounting areas requiring influencing, communicating effectively, and collaborating with senior leaders and stakeholders
• Qualified accounting qualification or MBA preferred
• Working knowledge of US GAAP and IFRS/Local GAAP as discipline basis for statutory reporting
• General knowledge of regulatory environments
• Understanding of financial and/or information tools and systems
• Relevant involvement in significant change projects and initiatives
• Virtual management across cultures and time zones
• Experience in a multinational company with a global footprint
• Operational excellence mindset
• Strong demonstration of business acumen, financial competency, audit discipline, language fluency, global thinking, effective communication, systems proficiency, change adaptability, flexibility, being able to operate in ambiguous situations, people management, business partnership and collaboration, and risk management.

FUNCTIONAL SKILLS:

• Managing the sustainability reporting process for multiple countries for a geography requires one to understand the supporting information framework as well as navigate new and ambiguous spaces to obtain required data while also enabling the assurance of such data when reported.
• Having basic finance and accounting competencies is valuable to sustainability reporting where data validity, verifiability, and auditability are key to success. In addition, CAPEX, OPEX, P&L implications as well as materiality thresholds pertinent to sustainability matters are relevant to the required disclosures.
• Establishing data and process standards as well as upholding data attributes that enable relevant reporting are important for quality.
• Influencing and partnering with various stakeholders (both senior leaders and junior team members) including third parties to align expectations, timelines, deliverables, and priorities amidst multiple demands, time pressures, and business changes, are critical to be effective in the role.
• Demonstrating strength in solving complex problems, ability to drive actions from analyses and insights, good judgment, and decision-making competencies are key success traits. Exhibiting leadership and growth behaviors (i.e., curiosity, empowerment, agility, inclusiveness), being solution-oriented, communicating effectively, and upholding an environment conducive to high performance are imperative.
• Promoting standardization and simplification as well as best practice-sharing across teams to raise overall organizational effectiveness is expected.
• Leading and developing a team of talented associates by providing meaningful challenges while also coaching and mentoring them are key to retention and engagement.
• Upholding and supporting a continuous learning culture in the team and across the network enables sustained high performance.

AS PLATFORM SERVICES FINANCE HUB, WE HAVE ASSIGNED PREFERABLE LOCATIONS FOR NEW ROLES BASED ON BUSINESS AND COMPLIANCE REQUIREMENTS. CANDIDATES LOCATED OUTSIDE THESE PREFERRED AREAS ARE INVITED TO APPLY, AND EACH APPLICATION WILL BE REVIEWED INDIVIDUALLY, BASED ON THE POSITION’S REQUIREMENTS AND LOCAL COMPLIANCE REGULATORY GUIDELINES.

Pay Range Not Availabl

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND TASKS:

• Partners with Global Record to Report Service Delivery Senior Directors and their regional Legal Entity Controlling teams to manage the metrics process for mandatory statutory reporting in compliance with all sustainability directives and requirements from different regulatory bodies globally (i.e., SEC, CSRD, ISSB, MCD, TCFD, California, etc.). Sustainability requirements typically encompass the enterprise’s and for some jurisdictions its value chain’s material impacts, financial risks and opportunities, strategy, policies, actions, metrics, and targets related to environmental, social, and governance matters as defined by the regulatory standards;
• Keeps abreast of the latest sustainability reporting rules and requirements applicable to the legal entities in scope (Coca-Cola companies and their value chain) as defined by the reporting boundaries, to ensure appropriateness, completeness, and consistency of metrics being collected, validated, managed, and disclosed for statutory purposes (each geography will own approximately ¼ of the total number of global legal entities required to report);
• Collaborates and communicates with multiple cross-functional stakeholders from various points of the enterprise’s organizational hierarchy (and for some requirements, across the value chain) in order to obtain a solid understanding of the data points being collected, validated, and managed to support disclosures as well as the assurance process by an external audit team;
• Provides a holistic review of the metrics (i.e., 100+ quantitative metrics per entity with potentially hundreds of business facilities in scope) collected, validated, and managed to ascertain reasonableness of information for reporting in accordance with prescribed timelines (i.e., monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, annually);
• Partners with Center Finance (i.e., Sustainability Finance – Controller’s Group), global Functional SMEs (i.e., Legal, PACS, Technical, HR), Region/Franchise, and Operating Unit (OU) leadership and teams to execute work for regulatory compliance. Partnership with the Center encompasses taking guidance and direction from interpretation of the regulatory requirements, participating in relevant training, and cascading the same to team members and stakeholders. Partnership with global functional SMEs means supporting them with data and information relevant to the required disclosures including flagging data gaps. Lastly, partnership with the Region/Franchise as well as OU leadership and teams requires effective communication and collaboration to meet data standards and reporting quality;
• Familiarizes with information systems (e.g., KOSMOS, KORE, workday, Workiva, etc.) that house relevant data for sustainability reporting (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions, pollution, water and marine resources, biodiversity, waste, workforce data, etc.), understands data movement from source to consolidation, and proposes technology needs and enhancements from a user perspective to optimize the reporting process in partnership with IT/DTS.
• Supports a healthy internal control environment guided by the ‘Book of Sustainability’, by executing activities in accordance with designed processes that address control risks as defined in the Company’s Risk and Control Matrix for sustainability reporting issued by the Controller’s Group;
• Reviews and approves the work of third-party vendors in accordance with established guidance, where such vendors are commissioned to supplement the execution of work; also, integrates third-party output with the rest of information pertinent to the legal entities for which sustainability disclosures are being made;
• Drives the evolution of the sustainability reporting space from transition state, to operational state, to transformed/optimized state as the business environment allows, aligned with the timeline for compliance as requirements dictate (i.e., phased approach across a number of years);
• Keeps a pulse on data quality, bearing in mind compliance with standards and consistency of information output for statutory reporting and business consumption in partnership with various teams and stakeholders;
• Partners effectively with other Finance Hub teams and audit service providers primarily to support the assurance process;
• Updates scope of reporting as applicable when new legal entities are established or when specific entities are liquidated;
• Evaluates the reasonableness and adequacy of the reporting process for statutory compliance while considering overall risk, and then engages senior leadership accordingly;
• Manages escalations and resolves issues raised by the team and stakeholders;
• Enables business continuity by establishing resource and other protocols in partnership with the Finance Hub team to support specific risk scenarios; and
• Is a manager/leader member of the Finance Hub-Financial Operations Service Delivery organization.