Vendor Management Lead, VP

Position Overview

Role Description

Within IVMO, the Vendor Management Lead acts as the single point of accountability, ensuring that contractual, commercial, and risk outcomes are effectively managed so that vendor relationships deliver sustained value, compliant service performance, and robust risk mitigation across the contract lifecycle.  The Vendor Management Lead is the subject matter expert for the management of DB’s most strategic vendors and contracts post-signature, leading cross functional stakeholder engagement, managing business demand and proactively identifying and resolving contractual, vendor performance, and risk issues. The role may manage a portfolio of contracts and vendors relating to specific business programmes within a larger divisional portfolio and may have people management responsibilities.

Global Procurement and Vendor Management (GPVM) Overview

The Global Procurement and Vendor Management function enables Deutsche Bank (DB) to optimize supplier relationships to meet its strategic objectives by:

• Partnering across DB to develop commercial strategies and create value from supplier relationships.

• Enabling the bank to manage Third-Party risks and purchase efficiently and compliantly.
• Managing sourcing demands and vendor performance on a divisional level.
• Implementing and upholding sustainable procurement practices.
• Driving transformation and ensuring future-proof procurement technology, data and processes.   

Within GPVM, the Infrastructure Vendor Management Office (IVMO) is responsible for the end-to-end management of vendors across all Infrastructure and TDI divisions to improve performance, mitigate risk, optimise costs and maximise commercial value.

What we’ll offer you

As part of our flexible scheme, here are just some of the benefits that you’ll enjoy

• Best in class leave policy
• Gender neutral parental leaves
• 100% reimbursement under childcare assistance benefit (gender neutral)
• Sponsorship for Industry relevant certifications and education
• Employee Assistance Program for you and your family members
• Comprehensive Hospitalization Insurance for you and your dependents
• Accident and Term life Insurance
• Complementary Health screening for 35 yrs. and above

Your key responsibilities

Business Partnering

• Lead contact for business engagement related to portfolio of contracts/vendors under management and act as interface to GPVM for queries from the business.
• Work with business to understand strategy and engage relevant stakeholder functions such as Strategic Procurement to support the build of required vendor eco-system.
• Build divisional third-party strategy and where applicable, supplier strategies, to support delivery of the business strategy.
• Manage and process sourcing requests in line with policy and the divisional third-party strategy.
• Provide reporting and insights across the vendor engagements and across the elements of vendor management.

Vendor Governance & Performance

• Act as the primary point of accountability for vendor governance, coordinating structured engagements with vendors and internal stakeholders to ensure alignment, transparency, and timely decision making.
• Maintain end-to-end visibility of all contracts in scope, ensuring a holistic overview of vendor performance and delivery and identifying opportunities for continuous improvement/innovation.
• Lead regular vendor governance and performance reviews, leveraging defined KPIs, SLAs, and ESG scoring to assess delivery quality, risk exposure, and value realization.

Commercial Contract Management

• Own and oversee contractual compliance by DB and third-party vendors, ensuring obligations are continuously monitored, documented, and enforced throughout the contract lifecycle.  
• Draft, negotiate and manage contractual changes and terminations for in-scope agreements in a structured and timely manner, ensuring continuity of service and protection of DB’s commercial and legal interests.
• Manage contractual issues and contractual disputes, leading negotiations with counterparties and engaging with the relevant DB functions such as Legal and Strategic Procurement to resolve, minimizing financial, operational, and reputational risk for DB.
• Conduct periodic contract and commercial reviews to confirm that vendor delivery remains aligned with agreed commercial terms, business demand, and the approved sourcing strategy.

Risk Management & Compliance

• Lead the remediation of in-scope supplier related audit findings and resolution of in-scope third-party risk issues where applicable.
• Ensure that applicable third-party risk, compliance, and ESG requirements are embedded into contractual documentation and reflected in ongoing governance and monitoring activities.
• Drive proactive remediation, corrective action plans, and consequence management in response to contractual, performance, risk, or ESG noncompliance, ensuring issues are addressed at root cause level.
• Provide visibility and reporting of risk management activity.

Your skills and experience

• Experience in Financial Services or a large corporate environment with an in-depth understanding of vendor management across the entire vendor lifecycle
• 8+ years of experience in vendor management with strong demonstrable skills and understanding across contract and commercial management, issue and dispute management, risk management, service performance management, supplier governance, vendor strategy
• Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills with the ability to navigate complex stakeholder environments
• Strong commercial awareness and understanding of different types of commercial models and how to implement and manage against them
• Strong financial acumen and understanding of business cases
• Ability to negotiate and draft commercial and contract terms and changes to those terms on Statements of Work essential
• Knowledge and exposure of sourcing process, RFI, RFP and contract lifecycle
• Strong analytical skills to analyse trends, data, spend and measure and drive improved vendor performance (SLAs, KPIs, KRIs) and internal business discipline
• Strategic overview/mindset and ability to shape business thinking
• Ability to deliver strategy
• Demonstrable experience of ability to leverage data to deliver reporting and insights to inform business decisions
• Experience in driving continuous improvement /innovation
• Legal understanding preferred
• Project management understanding preferred
• Supplier Relationship Management skills and experience or understanding an advantage
• People management experience an advantage
• Business Fluency in English required
• Capacity to effectively operate in ambiguous situations.
• Demonstrates initiative and works effectively with minimal supervision
• Experience of using Digital Procurement tools such as SAP Ariba, Coupa and digital contract workplaces
• Significant experience working with technology vendors and technology contracts is essential

How we'll support you

• Training and development support to achieve career goals
• Coaching by experts in the team
• A culture of continuing education to achieve individual goals
• Various services available throughout the Group

About us and our teams

Please visit our company website for further information:

https://www.db.com/company/company.html

We strive for a culture in which we are empowered to excel together every day. This includes acting responsibly, thinking commercially, taking initiative and working collaboratively.
Together we share and celebrate the successes of our people. Together we are Deutsche Bank Group.
We welcome applications from all people and promote a positive, fair and inclusive work environment.