The role
Nelum is seeking an experienced CFO or Fractional CFO with strong commodities, mining, international trade and taxation experience.
This is significantly more than a conventional technology-company CFO role. We need someone who understands the financial mechanics of physical commodities, particularly precious metals and gold, and who can advise the company on financial structures, taxation, pricing, cash flow, trade finance and investor readiness — across multiple jurisdictions.
The CFO will work directly with the CEO and the leadership team.
Key responsibilities
Financial strategy
- Develop Nelum's overall financial strategy and three-to-five-year financial models.
- Build budgets, forecasts and cash-flow models; establish financial KPIs and management reporting.
- Develop subscription revenue models, and analyse customer acquisition cost, lifetime value and unit economics.
- Establish appropriate financial controls and approval processes.
Commodities and mining finance
The successful candidate should understand the economics of physical commodity businesses, including:
- Gold and precious-metals trading economics; doré and refined-gold supply chains.
- Commodity purchase and sale agreements, pricing and margins.
- International commodity settlements, and FOB, CIF and other international trade terms.
- Refinery relationships, and the assay, refining and settlement process — including provisional and final settlement against differing assays.
- Working-capital requirements for commodity transactions, and commodity inventory and custody.
- Trade-finance structures and commodity-backed financing.
- Supplier and buyer payment structures.
- Foreign-exchange and commodity-price exposure, and how each is managed.
- Reconciliation of physical commodity movements with financial records.
Taxation: corridor and mining
Strong knowledge of, or access to specialist advice on:
- Mining-sector fiscal regimes and the tax treatment of mining and commodity transactions.
- Royalty regimes and their valuation bases.
- Export-related taxation and duties.
- The tax implications of gold and precious-metals trading.
- VAT and other indirect taxes, including where treatment differs between unrefined and investment-grade metal.
- Withholding tax.
Taxation: international structuring
- International commodity taxation and cross-border payments.
- Transfer pricing, including commodity-specific connected-party pricing rules.
- Tax residency and permanent-establishment considerations.
- Double-taxation treaties and the substance required to rely on them.
- UK, UAE, Nigerian and wider international cross-border tax considerations, with further jurisdictions added as corridors open.
- Tax-efficient and fully compliant corporate structuring.
Nelum's positions are built to be explained rather than defended. The candidate must understand the distinction between tax planning and tax avoidance or evasion, and work on the basis that a structure which cannot be shown to banks, auditors and development finance institutions is not a structure we build.
Fundraising and investment
- Prepare financial models, forecasts and use-of-funds plans for investors.
- Support pre-seed, seed and future institutional fundraising.
- Lead financial due diligence and develop the financial data room.
- Support valuation analysis and work with legal advisers on investment structures.
- Understand that capital may come from equity, trade and commodity finance, and concessional or impact providers — each reading a different part of the same numbers.
Governance
- Establish financial governance, reporting procedures, and policies for procurement, expenses and payments.
- Manage external accountants and tax advisers, and work with auditors.
- Advise the Board and leadership team on financial risk.
Ideal candidate
We are particularly interested in candidates with experience in mining, gold, precious metals, commodity trading, commodity finance, international trade, refining, financial services, fintech, SaaS, investment banking or trade finance.
Experience across the UK, the UAE and Dubai/DMCC, Nigeria, or other international commodity centres — Geneva, Zurich, Singapore, London, Johannesburg — would be highly valuable.
Qualifications
- ACA, ACCA, CIMA, CFA or an equivalent professional qualification is desirable.
Engagement
Fractional, moving to permanent. We are open to starting with a fractional arrangement and moving to a permanent executive role as Nelum scales. We would rather have two days a week from someone who has done this before than five from someone learning it here.
About Nelum
Nelum is a technology company building compliance-as-a-service and market-access infrastructure for artisanal and small-scale mining and the wider commodities sector. The platform helps licensed miners, mining cooperatives and commodity businesses become verified, compliant and buyer-ready, and improves transparency, traceability and responsible sourcing across international supply chains.
The platform is built to operate internationally. It is commodity-agnostic and corridor-based: a new producing country or a new material is a configuration of the same system rather than a separate build. The commodity scope is precious metals; tin, tantalum and tungsten; battery and technical metals; precious stones; and oil.
Our first corridor is Nigeria to Dubai, and our first material is gold — chosen because it is the hardest provenance environment in commodities. The company is structured for that reach from the outset: a UK parent, an intended operating entity in Dubai, engineering resourced internationally, and field operations beginning in Nigeria. The public platform runs in English, Arabic and Chinese.