Who are we?
At Finastra, we’re a global leader in financial services software, dedicated to expanding access to financial services and shaping what’s next for the industry. Our technology powers mission‑critical solutions across Lending, Payments and Universal Banking, supporting over 7,000 customers, including 80% of the world’s top 50 banks, in more than 110 countries.
Disclaimer:
Finastra has signed an agreement to sell its Universal Banking business to Pollen Street Capital, with completion expected end 2026 / early 2027, subject to consultation and customary closing conditions. Upon completion, this role is expected to transition to the standalone Universal Banking business, creating opportunities to support its future growth and success.
Role Overview
As a Services Pre Sales Lead at Finastra, you play a critical role at the intersection of pre-sales solutioning and delivery readiness. The goal is to win deals that we can deliver profitably and predictably. Your work ensures that what we propose to customers is both strategically aligned to their needs and executable by our delivery teams—supporting our mission to innovate finance together
Responsibilities
· Engage with Sales teams and prospective clients to understand business challenges and technical requirements across banking, payments and lending —core focus areas of Finastra’s portfolio.
· Validate solution assumptions and suggest services solution approach aligning with Finastra’s software architecture and ecosystem.
· Collaborate internally across Product and Delivery organization to ensure solution accuracy, feasibility and alignment to customer requirements.
· Work closely with Pre-sales team to run scope decomposition to build defensible services estimates (effort, cost, timeline).
· Present proposed solutions and SOW to customer stakeholders, articulating value proposition, defending estimations, elaborating delivery approach and execution strength.
· Build predictable and reasonable estimation methods including analogous past project comparables, parametric covering effort per product, customer type, volumes, etc and or bottoms-up approach to estimate at task level, for services scope.
· Lead internal review sessions with senior management to facilitate necessary approvals on estimates
· Produce indicative project plans with milestones, critical path, resourcing model, and contingency.
· Identify risks in scoping, delivery, estimation models ensuring mitigating strategies are suggested and aligned across all stakeholders and captured in the documents needed.
· Draft SOW documents (including scope, delivery method, deliverables, acceptance, roles/RACI, governance, change control).
· Facilitate SOW review and sign-off across various stakeholders in the organization while maintaining tight control of document version, changes and format.
· Coordinate partner workshares; integrate estimates; define quality gates and governance.
· Maintain basis-of-estimate, assumptions, and RAID; ensure InfoSec/compliance inputs are addressed.
· Run workshops internally including Sales, Product, Engineering, Support, Legal, and Finance to finalize proposals.
· Continuously refine estimation models using actuals and retrospectives.
· Work closely with sales and pre-sales team to manage deal timelines, intake process for estimation and necessary clarifications required to reasonably estimate.
· Maintain assumptions log and RAID from pre-sales through contract signature.
Qualifications and Experience Required
· 10+ years in Banking/FinTech services with 5+ years in core banking implementations.
· Strong experience working with services estimation, scoping and solutioning
· Excellent written skills with sufficient experience creating and managing SOWs
· Proven track record estimating and planning multi-country/multi-module programs.
· Ability to translate complex customer needs into services solutions requirements
· Familiarity with cloud-based service delivery, PaaS/SaaS solutions
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