- Location
- APAC-Australia
- Type
- Full-time
- Seniority
- Manager
- Experience
- 3+ years
- Education
- Master
Description
Sr. Business Innovation Manager
Department: Finance
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: APAC-Australia
Description
ABOUT THE ROLE
We are looking for a Sr. Manager, Business Innovation to join Align's New Business Models & Services team in APAC. This is neither a sales role nor a pure strategy role. It’s a “build-and-execute” position for someone who wants to create with urgency, can influence without authority, and gets things done without a detailed brief. Fintech fluency is a must.
This is a newly created role sitting in a small, high-visibility team in the CFO organization, tasked with transforming how Align goes to market through innovative business models, services and solutions. Reporting to the Senior Director, New Business Models & Services APAC, this role sits as a core member of the ANZ commercial leadership team.
You will be a key connector between the ANZ market needs and our global Business Model Innovation strategy. Working closely with Align's local commercial leaders and building close partnerships across Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Legal, you will diagnose growth blockers and design, test, and scale solutions that address them, translating market insight into scalable, revenue-generating programs. You will tweak and test existing solutions as well as identify and incubate new opportunities specific to ANZ.
Location: [ANZ: Sydney]
Travel: Estimated 30-40%
Key Responsibilities
ROLE EXPECTATIONS
- Embed yourself with the commercial team. Build trusted relationships. Become the person local leadership calls when they want to think about a problem differently.
- Run structured discovery to surface growth blockers.
- Understand existing innovation programs & priorities and figure out what they need to look like in ANZ.
- Build business cases, develop business plans, and evaluate new business opportunities for investment by the organization.
- Design and run pilots. Iterate fast. Know when to kill something and when to double down.
- Execute with urgency. Turn validated ideas into live programs, working across internal teams and external partners to make sure what gets built gets adopted.
- Source, evaluate and manage third-party partners. Negotiate agreements. Own the relationships.
- Develop the internal materials (playbooks, training, commercial enablement) that will allow the local teams to adopt and deploy what’s been proven.
- Feed learnings back into the global innovation team so that what works in one market can be adapted and scaled elsewhere
Skills, Knowledge & Expertise
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Strong business acumen, judgment, and maturity: you think naturally in terms of unit economics, incentive structures, and value exchange, not just features and benefits.
- Meaningful fintech experience: at least 3 years of hands-on experience in consumer lending, BNPL, payments, healthcare financing, or adjacent fintech domains. You understand how financing products are structured from both the provider and lender side, how to evaluate and negotiate with financial partners, and how to design solutions that work within the regulatory and consumer credit frameworks of ANZ.
- Experience with iterative product or solution design: You know how to run a structured pilot, what good validation looks like, and how to make go/no-go decisions based on imperfect information.
- Ability to context-switch easily: One week you're deep in a fintech partnership negotiation, the next you're thinking of systems integrations or designing new revenue models.
- Soft power and collaboration skills: You have a track record of getting things done through your credibility, your relationships, and your ability to make people want to work with you.
- Comfort with ambiguity and independent working: This team is small, and the mandate is broad. You need to be able to prioritize and create structure where there isn't any.
- Affinity for AI: you use AI tools as a practical part of how you work: research, analysis, synthesis and building materials. You keep pushing the boundaries of how it can make you (and the company) more effective.
- Strong project management, organizational, and analytical skills: Ability to manage budget, resources and multiple workstreams simultaneously.
EDUCATION AND/OR EXPERIENCE
- 10+ years of commercial / product management / consulting experience, of which at least 3 years in fintech, with a track record of building or scaling something (a product, a program, a market), not just executing a playbook.
- Bachelor's degree minimum; MBA or equivalent a plus but not required if the experience speaks for itself.
Nice to Have
- Experience in medtech, healthtech or any other regulated industry, in particular working within or alongside a DSO or multi-site dental or healthcare group.
- SaaS, platform or API product management experience, particularly relevant for systems integration work.
- Experience working in an overlay or matrix organization where influence without authority is the primary operating model.
Skills
Project ManagementNegotiation
