Back Office Associate

**Job Type**:Permanent

**Location**:Telford or Wythall preferred, but also Edinburgh

**Flexible working**:All of our roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process.

**Salary and benefits**:Competitive, discretionary bonus scheme, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more

**The role**

The Back Office Associate is to work closely with our third-party suppliers and internal stakeholders to validate and provide complete and accurate investment data for the business.

The incumbent will support the oversight of the third-party fund accounting and daily risk investment data. You will be the SME for investment asset data and accounting throughout the business systems. You will challenge and determine new processes and procedures, and support business queries and engage in a consistently changing environment. The incumbent will be actively involved in the design and development of new data system reconciliations and management information builds with our internal I.T team, whilst liaising with internal stakeholders on their needs, driving automation. The Back-office associate will help support holding third party suppliers such as the fund administrators, fund managers and custodians accountable to their SLAs. The incumbent will also help support a large amount of change within the team including new data systems, new fund managers, new custodians, new fund launches and asset transfers.

**Key responsibilities**
- **Ownership of the daily third-party fund accounting data **- Validating the third-party fund accounting investment data to external information, to ensure complete and accurate investment data feeds through to Phoenix internal systems for business decision making. Challenging the third-party fund accountant on any incorrect or late data and holding them accountable to their SLAs. Supporting investigations into any trade differences, incorrect or late data or trades and supporting correction to the root cause with third parties.
- **Ownership of daily risk investment data**:

- . Cash and stock reconciliations, daily price validation and the review of income and corporate actions. Liaising with Middle Office to clear outstanding breaks.
- **Defining and building reconciliations and controls. **- Working with I.T to help define, build, test and own new reconciliations and controls to ensure all internal Phoenix investment data systems have complete and accurate information for business decision making.
- **SME for business queries **- To be proactive in responding to and challenging data queries from all areas of the business and from third party suppliers, and investigate and correct root cause of any issues
- **Drive constant change activity **- Help, design, build, test and drive automation on new data system reconciliations and any management information builds with our internal I.T team. As well as support new fund managers, new fund launches and asset transfers.
- **Take a strong lead with internal and external relationships **
- **Internal - **Front Office, Middle Office, ALM & structuring team, Group Risk, BPA team, Finance and Actuarial, I.T, internal auditors, and Treasury
- **External - **Third party suppliers (Fund Administration, Fund Managers and Custodians), External Audit.

**What we're looking for**

Qualifications (desirable but not essential)
- Accounting qualification
- Investment qualification

Experience
- Experience of Aladdin essential
- Experience of Back Office or an Investment Operations function and systems and controls.
- Experience of oversight of third-party suppliers, such as fund administration, fund managers and custodians.
- Strong knowledge of accounting and investments
- Experience in investigating, correcting, and understanding root causes of reconciliation differences.
- Experience in query resolution
- Knowledge of third-party fund administrator and custodian systems.
- Basic understanding of the Phoenix business model
- Experience in an operations environment experiencing a high level of change.

Personal Attributes
- Communication and technical skills to interact with internal and external other stakeholders.
- Ability to challenge current processes and controls.
- Ability to challenge third party suppliers and hold them accountable to their agreed SLAs
- Ability to work independently
- Proactive and adaptive within a constant changing environment.
- Investigations skills throughout many data systems is key.

**We want to hire the whole version of you**

We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you.

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