Pre Sales Lead

Overview

Services Pre Sales Lead at Finastra, sitting at the intersection of pre-sales solutioning and delivery readiness to win deals that can be delivered profitably and predictably across banking, payments and lending.

What you'll do

• Engage with Sales teams and prospective clients to understand business challenges and technical requirements across banking, payments and lending.
• Validate solution assumptions and suggest services solution approach aligning with Finastra's software architecture and ecosystem.
• Collaborate internally across Product and Delivery to ensure solution accuracy, feasibility and alignment to customer requirements.
• Work closely with the Pre-sales team to run scope decomposition and build defensible services estimates (effort, cost, timeline).
• Present proposed solutions and SOW to customer stakeholders, articulating value proposition, defending estimations, and elaborating delivery approach and execution strength.
• Build predictable estimation methods using analogous past project comparables, parametric models and/or bottom-up task-level estimates.
• Lead internal review sessions with senior management to facilitate approvals on estimates.
• Produce indicative project plans with milestones, critical path, resourcing model, and contingency.
• Identify risks in scoping, delivery and estimation models, suggest mitigating strategies, and capture them in the required documents.
• Draft SOW documents including scope, delivery method, deliverables, acceptance, roles/RACI, governance and change control.
• Facilitate SOW review and sign-off across stakeholders while maintaining tight control of document version, changes and format.
• Coordinate partner workshares, integrate estimates, and define quality gates and governance.
• Maintain basis-of-estimate, assumptions, and RAID; ensure InfoSec/compliance inputs are addressed.
• Run internal workshops with 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 teams to manage deal timelines, estimation intake and necessary clarifications.
• Maintain assumptions log and RAID from pre-sales through contract signature.

What you'll need

• 10+ years in Banking/FinTech services with 5+ years in core banking implementations.
• Strong experience 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 solution requirements.
• Familiarity with cloud-based service delivery and PaaS/SaaS solutions.
• Skilled in pricing models (T&M, FP, hybrid) and risk management.
• Excellent customer communication and executive presence.
• Strong analytical thinking and problem-solving capabilities.

Nice to have

• Certifications: PMP/Prince2, Agile (Scrum/SAFe), Six Sigma.
• ITIL is a plus.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru.
• Hybrid working arrangements are offered.