Head of CRM

Head of CRM

Application Deadline: 27 February 2026

Department: Operational Functions

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: London

Description

Job Title: Head of CRM
Reports to: Head of Operations

Division: Operations
Location: London
AFME is a leading trade association for the European wholesale financial markets, employing 100 people across three locations in London, Brussels and Frankfurt.

The Head of CRM is responsible for owning, shaping and delivering AFME's end to end CRM strategy, ensuring the platform meets organisational, commercial and operational needs. This role will lead the development of CRM capability, data quality, governance, and user engagement across the organisation.

The postholder will partner closely with all business areas; policy, advocacy, events, membership, finance, and marketing to strengthen data driven decision making, streamline processes, and ensure the CRM remains a single source of truth for AFME's members, contacts, activity and engagement records.

This is a cross organisational role that ensures CRM supports AFME's strategic priorities, commercial objectives, and member engagement goals - providing expert guidance, strong relationship building, and operational oversight.

Key Responsibilities

CRM Strtegy & Leadership

• Own the end to end CRM strategy, roadmap, architecture and platform capability.
• Provide a holistic, technical and functional view of CRM, ensuring it aligns with AFME's organisational needs and commercial priorities.
• Serve as the organisation's senior CRM expert, sought after for informed, thoughtful advice.
• Lead CRM governance, ensuring data standards, processes, ownership, and compliance are established and adhered to.
• Keep abreast of industry and technology developments, proactively improving CRM performance.

Data Quality, Governance & Compliance

• Act as AFME's data supervisor for CRM, ensuring compliance with data protection and internal governance standards.
• Drive a culture of high quality data input across all teams; establish clear accountability for data ownership.
• Lead data quality initiatives including audits, cleansing programmes, validation rules, and process redesigns.
• Ensure consistent data structures, mandatory fields, and input rules to prevent workarounds and data degradation.
• Oversee classification, maintenance and mapping of contacts, organisations and engagement activities.

Business Partnering & Stakeholder Engagement

• Build strong relationships across all divisions, understanding needs and shaping CRM functionality to support them.
• Work closely with policy, advocacy, events, membership, finance, and marketing to improve processes and reporting.
• Help teams drive commercial value, including member retention, sales pipeline visibility, sponsorship tracking, and targeted campaigns.
• Support senior leadership with data insights, dashboards, segmentation and reporting.

Platform, Processes & Integration

• Lead ongoing improvements to CRM workflows, automation, integrations, and user experience.
• Ensure CRM effectively supports key AFME processes (event registration, invoicing, membership, marketing lists, finance synchronisation, committee lists, etc.).
• Oversee resolution of system issues such as data sync problems, slow input processes, inconsistent lists, and manual workarounds.
• Work with IT, internal stakeholders and third party partners to ensure system reliability, performance, and secure access.
• Oversee enhancements to reporting, dashboards, segmentation, and analytics.

User Training, Engagement & Change Leadership

• Take responsibility for continuous education, coaching and upskilling of CRM users.
• Deliver structured onboarding, training and guidance materials to support best practice use.
• Foster a culture of data stewardship, engagement and collective ownership.
• Actively encourage collaboration, new ideas, and user feedback to improve functionality and adoption.

Team Leadership & Management

• Manage a small, high performing CRM team.
• Provide coaching, professional development, and clear performance expectations.
• Manage workload, priorities and delivery to ensure a strong operational service.
• Promote excellence, accountability, and a collaborative team culture.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Essential:

• Previous experience working in a trade association or membership body, preferably within financial services.
• Experience with Dynamics 365 (CRM) or similar platforms with a depth of CRM knowledge and design expertise.
• Proven ability to lead CRM strategy, capability development and cross organisation adoption.
• Strong data governance, data quality, and compliance experience.
• Ability to build trusted relationships and influence stakeholders at all levels.
• Experience supporting sales, marketing and member engagement functions including segmentation, lead generation, and campaign effectiveness.Ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly for non technical audiences.
• Demonstrable experience managing and developing a high performing team.

Desirable:

• Experience with event platform integrations, marketing automation or membership systems.
• Familiarity with dashboards, analytics tools and BI reporting (e.g., Power BI).
• Understanding of process optimisation, workflows and automation tools (e.g., Power Automate).
• Vendor management and contract oversight experience.

Benefits

The Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) provides an excellent benefits package for employees and their eligible dependents. The benefits package includes:

• 27 days Annual Holiday Allowance
• Additional 1 day Birthday Holiday
• Additional 3 days Christmas Holiday
• Private Medical Insurance
• Health Cash Plan
• Dental Insurance
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Pension Scheme - AFME contributes 10% of an employee's basic salary
• Life Assurance of 4x base salary
• Income Protection Insurance
• Worldwide Business and Leisure Travel Insurance
• Season Ticket Loan
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• EV Car Lease Scheme
• Workplace Nursery Benefit
• 4pm Friday Finish
• Hybrid working and flexi-start/finish times