Senior Accountant

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.

**Job Purpose**

As an experienced qualified accountant at Canada Life you will be responsible for managing the completion of regulatory reporting requirements, complex reconciliation and production of board papers related to the UK division, as well as European entitieswhere appropriate.

Using your significant specialist technical expertise and solid commercial understanding you will take a lead within the following:
Lead a team of trainees and accountants
Deliver accounting and reporting tasks associated with the Onshore Wealth & Asset Management Line of businesses
Responsible for Management, Statutory and Regulatory reporting
Support ad
- hoc projects with associated line of businesses

**Key Accountabilities**

1) Initiating and overseeing the production of regular reports, regulatory returns and reconciliations. Examples may include the below depending on your specialism:

- Quarterly and annual Canada Life Limited / other UK, IOM or European Entities regulatory returns within the deadlines set by the regulator
- Full balance sheet reconciliations between local and regulatory reporting
- Review and signoff processes of the UK Division statutory accounts including all commentary and disclosures for all companies within the deadlines set by regulation and local management
- Prepare monthly financial reporting updates for the Canada Life UK division, to include UK statutory & regulatory reporting, European entity statutory & regulatory reporting, IOM statutory & regulatory reporting, direct & indirect taxation and IFRS developments
- Produce iXBRL tagged versions of the statutory accounts for submission to HMRC with the tax returns
- Quarterly review of the overall UK Division balance sheet including presentation to the Financial Accounting and Reporting Director

2) In completing your responsibilities in regular reporting, you will be responsible for:

- Review and obtain sign off for the reconciliation producing
- managing the timetable,
- monitoring and ensuring progress,
- production and submission of reporting packs once all necessary internal review and signoff processes have been completed.
- Ensure that all validation errors within the regulatory reporting systems are cleared prior to submission

3) Work with external auditors to ensure clean audit reports are obtained for all companies within set deadlines. Own the statutory 'Prepared by client list’ of information requested by the external auditors and ensure information is provided to the externalauditors in a timely and accurate manner to minimise audit costs.

4) Ensure that all auditor identified accounting adjustments are reflected in the company ledgers and that operational processes are updated to ensure repetition is avoided.

5) Lead on responses to external regulators both in the UK and other jurisdictions we operate in. Keep up to date with changes to regulatory reporting requirements from the PRA, EIOPA, FSA, CBI and other regulators that could potentially impact reportingand manage the dissemination of that information through the relevant departments as required

6) Identify and implement process changes to improve quality as well as processing times to ensure that the regulatory reporting deadlines can be met.

7) Ensure that appropriate controls over regulatory reporting exist and that these are operating effectively. Ensure that any reporting data issues and/or key control deficiencies are escalated and remediated in a timely manner.

8) Deputise for the relevant 'Head of’/’Manager’ for the function when required

9) Responsible for reviewing the recommendations of other qualified accountants and part-qualified accountants and providing feedback, coaching and mentoring to support their development. Management of a team of newly qualified/ trainee accountants.

**Desired Knowledge / Experience / Skills**

**Technical Expertise**:

- Understand complex data and information with the ability to interpret and recommend commercially astute courses of action; constructively challenging and helping develop others’ thinking and understanding.
- Proven ability to lead on high-profile projects, utilising experience in project management techniques to deliver complex projects on-time, in-full.
- Willing and capable of taking difficult and complex 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.

**Relationship Building**:

- The ability to develop and maintain strong relationships across the actuarial function and the wider business, acting with integrity and role modelling the company values at all times.
- Strong interpersonal/networking skills, with the ability to maintain a variety of relationships with multiple stakeholders,
- Ability to flex their style and delivery, in the moment, depending on the individual and/or audience.
**Developing Self and Others**:

- Strong coaching ability in technical, and non-technical skills in order to support the development of others.
- An interested and inquisitive individual who is committed to their own ongoing professional and personal development

**Qualifications**:
ACCA or CIMA