Head: Operations (Cape Town or Sandton)

Our vision is to be the preferred partner to Corporate and Public Sector by providing an awesome client experience and comprehensive solutions that enable the financial resilience and prosperity of those entities and their employees. We believe in creating and cultivating a positive, energised working environment that gives every individual the opportunity to achieve success by embracing diversity and growing our talent. We do this through living our values of having the courage to be bold, care, collaboration and an intolerance for mediocrity.

Overall purpose of the role

The Head of Operations is responsible for overseeing all operational functions and processes within Sanlam Umbrella Solutions, including quotes operations, financial and risk management, compliance, new business vetting and implementation, and stakeholder management. The role has senior direct reports and requires a seasoned professional, a leader & developer of people who has previously demonstrated tactical and strategic leadership capability. The successful candidate will be reporting to the Managing Executive: Sanlam Umbrella Solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Financial reporting - Responsible for accurate and timeous management information on a monthly and quarterly basis to management and executive committees.
• Compliance and Risk Management – ensuring best practice compliance monitoring and reporting, cooperating with Sanlam Corporate central compliance and risk functions.
• Stakeholder management and engagement with various internal and external stakeholders (This includes Vendor management; Outsource agreements; Corporate Finance, Risk, Compliance teams; Internal audit engagement and relationship; Facilities).
• Operational Process - Ensure optimal operational processes and controls to ensure delivery in line with SLA’s.
• Operations management – provide the operations area with direction in terms of the business strategic goals, new business implementation, contracts, investment operations.
• Budget preparation and monitoring.
• People management - set clear direction to team members in respect of team goals, objectives and outputs, performance management, training, mentoring and resource management.
• Systems – monitoring systems for suitability to business needs and providing input into the prioritisation of enhancements and requirements.
• Expense management – driving efficiencies across the different areas including active management of controllable vs uncontrollable expenses, acquisition expenses vs maintenance expenses vs project costs, support costs.

Qualification and Experience

• Relevant degree (postgraduate qualification advantageous)
• 5 – 7 years management experience in retirement fund administration.
• Strong commercial acumen.
• Risk and Compliance experience is beneficial.

Knowledge and Skills

• Sound knowledge of retirement funds.
• Working knowledge of operational processes.
• Risk and Compliance.
• Retirement fund administration systems.
• Proven ability to lead a team.

Core Competencies

• Cultivates Innovation by creating new and better ways for the organisation to be successful.
• Client Focus - Building strong customer relationships and delivering customer-centric solutions.
• Drives Results - Consistently achieving results, even under tough circumstances.
• Collaborates - Building partnerships and working collaboratively with others to meet shared objectives.
• Resilience - Rebounding from setbacks and adversity when facing difficult situations.

Personal Qualities

• Organisational Savvy – Maneuvering comfortably through complex policy, process and people related organizational dynamics.
• Manages Complexity – Making sense of complex, high quantity and sometimes contradictory information to effectively solve problems.
• Drives Engagement – Creating a climate where people are motivated to do their best to help the organisation achieve its objectives.
• Business Insight – Applying knowledge of the business and marketplace to advance the organisation’s goals.

Our commitment to transformation

The Sanlam Group is committed to transformation and embracing diversity and our employment equity plan and targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. This commitment is what drives us to achieve a diverse workplace with employment equity as a key goal to create an inclusive workforce, representative of the demographics of our society as well as people with disabilities.