Special Projects Lead

Posted Today by eFinancialCareers
New
Competitive salary
Potters Bar , Hertfordshire
Permanent, full-time
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Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer-focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third party customers.

Job Purpose

At Canada Life you will be responsible for providing financial insight and analysis to senior management and working with a wide range of stakeholders in Finance and across the wider business. This role requires ownership and leadership of ad hoc projects.

As a qualified actuary or technical accountant, you have a strong understanding of the IFRS and Solvency II reporting standards and complex balance sheets of financial services companies. You will use your technical expertise and sound commercial understanding to advise the business and influence decisions, ensuring that we are managing risk exposure to the business to satisfy our risk appetite, our statutory responsibilities and the needs of policyholders and our regulators.

You will have a specific focus on the production of monthly and quarterly management and board information of our legal entity's solvency and liquidity, investment performance, new business profitability and capital efficiency of our business lines.

You will work with closely with the Financial Reporting, Capital Planning and Asset & Liability Management teams to prepare the annual business plan and quarterly forecast/reforecasts, ensuring consistency with trading plans and CLUK's strategic and operating goals. You will lead ad hoc projects / reviews to identify options to improve the capital efficiency of our lines of businesses. This includes understanding and communicating the impact of basis changes on earnings and capital to senior stakeholders.

Duties/Responsibilities
  • Support business planning and forecasting, focussing on capital efficiency, balance sheet reporting and investment performance. This will involve working closely with other finance teams to ensure consistency of assumptions, consistency with commercial trading plans and robust review and risk analysis of central planning assumptions. When necessary, you will provide challenge and lead guidance to head office teams on the suitability of assumptions used in planning and forecasting for the UK business.
  • Produce regular reporting and reviews of new business profitability, investments performance, ROE and solvency and liquidity, providing insight and commentary to senior managers in the UK and our head office teams in Canada. You will play a key and influential role in influencing decisions made in respect of the segments and markets that we participate in.
  • Operate cross-functionally across Finance, and other areas of the business on BAU and project activities related to CLUK's capital optimisation plans and other ad hoc projects, such as reinsurance strategy, where the key to success will be demonstrating your ability to lead projects as well as collaborate with internal peers and senior stakeholders.
  • Work closely with the investment reporting and ALM teams to provide objective review of investment review plans and tracking. As part of this you will consider the parent companies' investment and reporting policies and have up-to-date knowledge of macro-economic developments.
  • Lead the provision of timely, relevant and reliable Management and Board Information (CLL) related liquidity and dividend payments.
Skills/Knowledge/Experience

Technical Expertise
  • Developing expertise in 1 or more areas within the function, demonstrating sound understanding of complex models with the ability to interpret financial information and controls to accurately advise stakeholders to inform their decisions.
  • Good knowledge of a variety of actuarial models and controls and their commercial application/implication.
  • Advanced MS excel skills demonstrating efficient use of spreadsheets and basic data manipulation skills
Communication:
  • Excellent analytical and report writing/drafting skills
  • Can explain complexities in a straightforward and accurate way to audiences of differing levels of understanding, with some coaching or support from senior managers.
  • Proven communication, influencing and negotiation skills whereby they can adapt their message to the audience, demonstrating their ability to share knowledge with the business in a format that is easily understood, balancing the need for required detail where this is necessary and higher level information.
Relationship Building:
  • The ability to develop and maintain strong relationships across the actuarial function, acting with integrity and role modelling the company values at all times, in order to support the organisation in achieving its goals and mitigating the organisations' exposure to risk.
  • Being able to flex their style and approach to different individuals, with occasional support, in order to achieve a successful outcome.
Planning and use of initiative:
  • Willing and capable of taking decisions independently in order to progress issues, and able to exercise sound judgement and commercial sense to understand the importance of different issues and assess when matters need to be escalated.
  • Able to effectively plan, organise and execute their own work with minimal supervision, using their sound judgement to spot conflicting priorities and readjust their workload accordingly, with escalation to management only when appropriate.
  • Identify opportunities for improving processes and propositions and competently analyse and communicate these to line management
Developing Self
  • An interested and inquisitive individual who is committed to their own ongoing professional and personal development.
  • Strong commercial awareness and understanding of the needs of the business. Will be able to apply technical financial techniques and understand business/commercial implications.
Qualifications
ACCA, CIMA, ACA or Fellow of Institute of Actuaries (or equivalent)

Benefits of working at Canada Life

We believe in recognising and rewarding our people, so we offer a competitive salary and benef

Reference: 53213090

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