Head of Operational Resilience

At M&G our purpose is to help people manage and grow their savings and investments, responsibly. As a business, we are continuing to take steps towards a sustainable future, delivering better long-term solutions for our customers and clients and identifying new opportunities to make a positive impact for our environment and communities. To help us achieve our vision we’re looking for exceptional people who live our values of care and integrity and who can inspire others; embrace change; deliver results and keep it simple.

We will consider flexible working arrangements for any of our roles and also offer work place accommodations to ensure you have what you need to effectively deliver in your role.

The Role: Head of Resilience and Recovery, Operational Resilience - M&G Life

12 month FTC

You will work closely with other key stakeholders within M&G to ensure a ‘joined up approach’ to resilience oversight and effectiveness including teams covering all pillars of Operational Resilience (third party, data, technology, people, and facilities).

Through rigorous testing, you will need to lead the team to analyse and identify any potential resilience vulnerabilities or risks to M&G’s Important Business Services, report and propose improvements to ensure tolerances can be maintained, especially during disruption events and evolved in line with the business.

During any disruption, you will lead crisis management activities for Life Business, feeding into the broader M&G incident management framework, and keep Senior Management informed throughout, taking actions to ensure continuous improvement post any lessons learned activity.

You will also be responsible for continually looking to enhance the approach to Operational resilience through, insight, learnings and wider industry knowledge.

Key Responsibilities:

- Act as first point of contact and resilience SME for M&G Life, providing resilience and continuity advice to deliver a seamless Operational Resilience framework within the business.
- Support the maturing of the Third-Party Risk framework, Operational Resilience framework and First Line Risk activity to enable data-driven insights and oversight of Third-Party Risk and Operational Resilience to the board, senior management, and other key stakeholders.
- Drive and support engagement with key stakeholders on Operational Resilience and Third-Party Risk Management and Outsourcing regulatory rules and guidance.
- Drive the Embedding and Enhancement of the Operational Resilience Framework within M&G Life to help drive the future resilience of our business.
- Drive the maintenance and oversight of the M&G Life’s Operational Resilience and the Third-Party Risk Policies and Standards ensuring they are embedded in all areas of the business.
- Define and deliver a robust governance model for M&G Life to ensure that risks to resilience are effectively overseen and providing adequate visibility to the SMF24 on the Operational Resilience risk posture.
- Drive and deliver the annual programme of work, against a defined plan, in respective of the maintenance of Important Business Services, Impact Tolerances, Mapping, Scenario Testing, Vulnerability Management and Self-Assessment
- Identify and drive any required Operational Resilience and Third-Party Risk controls testing, assurance and / or audit examination requirements.
- Maintain, enhance, and present the annual Operational Resilience Self-Assessment, supporting the Accountable Executive with Senior Management and Board level reporting.

Key Skills and Requirements:
Essential
- Confident and influential leader at all levels.
- Extensive experience in leading Operational Resilience areas and programmes in Financial Services
- Deliver a complex programme of work in relations to Operational Resilience.
- Excellent stakeholder with strong leadership skills.
- Strong communication skills displayed through confident interpersonal and presentation abilities. Excellent written and oral communication skills
- Ability to work cross functionally across wider business
- Strong Awareness of risk management practices,
- Ability to developing new or innovative solutions to supplier and Operational Resilience management, monitoring and governance challenges.
- Ability to articulate key principles of Third-Party Risk and Resilience (including Business Continuity and Crisis Management) disciplines including supplier resilience.
- Stress resilient.
- Experience of vendor and supplier engagement and oversight

Desirable
- Experience in delivery of First Line risk, Third-Party Risk management and/or Operational Resilience programmes.
- Experience of developing new or innovative solutions to resilience and Third-Party Risk management challenges.
- Experience of working in the Financial Sector within a dual FCA/PRA regulated firm
- Experience in working with large and/or unstructured data sets on non-financial risk topics such as risk management, resilience, or Third-Party Risk m