Head of Risk Operating Office

**Job Type**: Permanent

**Location**:This role could be based in either our London, Birmingham, Telford or Edinburgh offices with time spent working in the office and at home.

**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. You can read more about Phoenix Flex here.

**Closing Date**:12.6.25

**Salary and benefits**: Up to £120,000 plus indicative bonus potential of 30-60%, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

**What are we looking for?**

**The role**

As Head of Operating Office - Risk Strategy & Transformation, you will be the right hand to the Risk Strategy & Transformation Director, accountable for turning vision into action, insight into decision, and ambition into sustainable progress.

**Key Responsibilities**
- Own and evolve the Group’s SMCR ‘reasonable steps’ framework, ensuring a robust structure around the CRO’s personal regulatory accountabilities.
- Set the standards for executive and Board-level risk reporting, interrogating and shaping content that reflects true insight, not just information.
- Lead the coordination and delivery of enterprise-wide MI and KRI dashboards, partnering with Finance and functional leads to embed high-quality data and analysis across the business.
- Drive development and adoption of a modern, digitised Risk Operating Model, aligned to our wider enterprise transformation — ensuring relevance, agility, and capability at every level.
- Facilitate deep-dive performance and capability reviews with the Risk Leadership Team to assess delivery against operating plan commitments, including cost efficiency and transformation objectives.
- Act as the risk function’s strategic finance lead, owning forecasting, cost allocation and expense performance - partnering closely with Finance and the commercial business.
- Champion the use of technology and AI to improve operational efficiency, challenge outdated ways of working, and surface risk insight with less manual effort and greater impact.
- Break silos and drive alignment — ensuring consistent standards, connected workflows, and shared accountability across risk teams and their stakeholders.

**Essential**

You are an experienced leader with a proven ability to operate at the top table. You combine operational grip with strategic foresight and can confidently take ownership of cross-cutting challenges with senior stakeholders.
- You bring credibility in complex, regulated environments — ideally within financial services — and understand the expectations on senior managers under SMCR.
- You’re skilled in translating complex data and risk insight into strategic narrative, ready for Executive and Board-level consumption.
- You’re experienced in leading change — from digitising risk and control processes to modernising functional operating models.
- You know how to interrogate assumptions, challenge constructively, and drive meaningful progress on both financial performance and functional effectiveness.
- You’re comfortable at the intersection of risk, finance, operations and transformation — a natural connector, problem-solver and facilitator.

**Why This Role?**

This is your chance to leave a lasting mark on one of the UK’s most influential Risk Functions — helping us move faster, think sharper, and operate smarter. You’ll work alongside a supportive and ambitious CRO, a high-calibre Risk Leadership Team, and senior partners across Finance, Strategy and Transformation.

Together, we’ll raise the bar for what excellent risk governance looks like.

**Who are we?**

We want to be the best place that any of our 6,600 colleagues have ever worked.

We’re the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business. We offer a range of products across our market-leading brands, Standard Life, SunLife, Phoenix Life and ReAssure. Around 1 in 5 people in the UK has a pension with us. We’re a FTSE 100 organisation that is tackling key issues such as transitioning our portfolio to net zero by 2050, and we’re not done yet.

**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.

If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.

**Find out more about #LifeAtPhoenix**

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