VP, Growth Initiatives - Financial Services

Ohio - Columbus, One Nationwide Plaza
Full-time
$254,250.00-$423,750.00
Posted Nov 11, 2026

Skills

Financial Modeling

Job description

Are you passionate about being part of a team at a Fortune 100 company with nearly $70 billion in annual sales that delivers extraordinary care to help individuals and businesses prepare for and protect their future? If so, then Nationwide Financial could be the place for you! At Nationwide®, “on your side” goes beyond just words. Our customers and partners are at the center of everything we do and we’re looking for associates who are passionate about delivering extraordinary care.

Job Description Summary

As the Vice President, you will lead exploration of high-potential priority growth initiatives identified by the Nationwide Financial Leadership Team (NFLT). You’ll help determine where focused, cross-functional effort can generate meaningful, additive growth across Nationwide Financial businesses.

Reporting directly to the President & COO, Nationwide Financial, you will operate at the intersection of customer needs, market opportunity, business capabilities, distribution, economics, and execution. You’ll translate sponsored initiatives into clear opportunity hypotheses, build fact-based recommendations, and mobilize the right partners to test, refine, and advance the most promising concepts. Growth opportunities are expected to complement and expand existing business strategies.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities:

•Explore and shape priority growth initiatives

•Lead exploration of business-line-adjacent growth initiatives, translating broad NFLT direction into focused questions, hypotheses, and choices.

•Partner across NFLT to understand current business capabilities, unique business needs, customer opportunities, and potential expansion into new markets or distribution channels.

•Assess whether opportunities are strategically attractive, additive to existing business strategies, financially compelling, operationally feasible, and appropriate for further investment.

•Incubate, evaluate, and advance opportunities

•Convert priority initiatives into clear concepts, hypotheses, and testable value propositions.

•Lead structured discovery, design, and evaluation work to determine whether an opportunity warrants further investment or should be stopped.

•Build concise business cases that articulate the customer problem, strategic rationale, expected additive growth, target economics, required capabilities, risks, milestones, and decision points.

•Design and oversee pilots, experiments, or other staged learning approaches that improve the quality and speed of investment decisions.

•Establish clear transition criteria for moving an opportunity from exploration to an identified business-unit sponsor, scale, or deliberate stop.

•Mobilize enterprise collaboration and decision-making

•Convene the right leaders and subject-matter experts across Nationwide Financial and the enterprise to assess opportunities and resolve key questions.

•Create alignment around priorities, decision rights, milestones, and resource requirements without creating a parallel operating structure.

•Prepare clear recommendations and decision materials for the President & COO, NFLT, and relevant leadership forums.

•Partner across NFLT to ensure that opportunities are informed by operating realities and, when approved, have an accountable business-unit sponsor.

•Surface dependencies, tradeoffs, and barriers early and help leaders make timely choices.

•Build a repeatable growth discipline

•Establish practical methods, governance, tools, and performance measures for opportunity identification, incubation, and progression.

•Maintain a transparent portfolio view of opportunities, including stage, owner, investment, expected value, key risks, and next decision.

•Capture lessons learned and strengthen the organization’s ability to move from insight to tested concept to scaled business outcome.

•Develop the role’s team, partner model, and resource base over time in line with the size and maturity of the opportunity portfolio.

May perform other responsibilities as assigned.

Reporting Relationships: Reports to President & COO, Nationwide Financial

Typical Skills and Experiences:

Education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience. A degree in business, finance, economics, or a related field is preferred. An advanced degree or other relevant professional credential is a plus.

Experience: Substantial senior leadership experience in financial services or another complex, regulated, customer-focused industry, with a track record of identifying, shaping, and advancing new growth opportunities. Demonstrated experience moving opportunities from early hypotheses through customer and market validation, business-case development, executive decision-making, and transition to an accountable business owner. Experience assessing customer needs, market attractiveness, distribution channels, business capabilities, economics, risk, and investment requirements. Experience leading complex, cross-functional initiatives across business lines and enterprise functions, including the ability to influence outcomes without relying on formal authority. Preferred experience includes launching or expanding products, services, business models, markets, or distribution channels; designing pilots or experiments; and building or evaluating business cases for new investments, capabilities, or operating models.

Knowledge, Abilities and Skills: Knowledge of financial-services customers, products, distribution models, market dynamics, competitive positioning, operating models, and emerging growth opportunities. Knowledge of business-case development, market and customer assessment, financial modeling, investment evaluation, risk considerations, and stage-gated decision-making. Ability to translate broad executive direction into focused opportunity hypotheses, strategic choices, and actionable workplans. Ability to influence, align, and mobilize senior stakeholders across business units and enterprise functions without direct authority. Ability to operate effectively in ambiguity, distinguish promising opportunities from attractive ideas, and make disciplined recommendations to advance, reshape, or stop an initiative. Exceptional executive communication, including concise written recommendations, presentations, storytelling, and facilitation. Strong strategic, financial, analytical, problem-solving, stakeholder management, relationship-building, negotiation, and conflict-navigation skills. Sound judgment in balancing ambition, speed, risk, compliance, and execution feasibility in a highly regulated environment.

Other criteria, including leadership skills, competencies and experiences may take precedence.

Staffing exceptions to the above must be approved by the hiring manager’s leader and Human Resource Business Partner.

Values: Regularly and consistently demonstrates the Nationwide Values.

Job Conditions:

Overtime Eligibility: Not Eligible (Exempt)

Working Conditions: Normal office environment.

ADA: The above statements cover what are generally believed to be principal and essential functions of this job. Specific circumstances may allow or require some people assigned to the job to perform a somewhat different combination of duties.

Benefits

We have an array of benefits to fit your needs, including: medical/dental/vision, life insurance, short and long term disability coverage, paid time off with newly hired associates receiving a minimum of 18 days paid time off each full calendar year pro-rated quarterly based on hire date, nine paid holidays, 8 hours of Lifetime paid time off, 8 hours of Unity Day paid time off, 401(k) with company match, company-paid pension plan, business casual attire, and more. To learn more about the benefits we offer, click here .

Nationwide is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive culture where everyone feels challenged, appreciated, respected and engaged. Nationwide prohibits discrimination and harassment and affords equal employment opportunities to employees and applicants without regard to any characteristic (or classification) protected by applicable law.

NOTE TO EMPLOYMENT AGENCIES:

We value the partnerships we have built with our preferred vendors. Nationwide does not accept unsolicited resumes from employment agencies. All resumes submitted by employment agencies directly to any Nationwide employee or hiring manager in any form without a signed Nationwide Client Services Agreement on file and search engagement for that position will be deemed unsolicited in nature. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is subsequently hired as a result of the referral or through other means.

Nationwide pays on a geographic-specific salary structure and placement within the actual starting salary range for this position will be determined by a number of factors including the skills, education, training, credentials and experience of the candidate; the scope, complexity and location of the role as well as the cost of labor in the market; and other conditions of employment. If a Sales job, Sales Incentives, based on performance goals are possible in addition to this range. Note on Compensation for Part-Time Roles: Please be aware that the salary ranges listed below reflect full-time compensation. Actual compensation may be prorated based on the number of hours worked relative to a full-time schedule.

The national salary range for VP, Growth Initiatives - Financial Services : $254,250.00-$423,750.00

The expected starting salary range for VP, Growth Initiatives - Financial Services : $254,250.00-$423,750.00