Finance Officer - JHB at Liberty Group South Africa

Purpose

The role presents and exciting opportunity for the successful incumbent to further their career by gaining sought after experience and skills, and interaction with other departments and business units. The main function of the role is to ensure that information in relation to the Group’s investment assets is processed timeously & accurately in the general ledger and is duly reconciled to source systems. The successful candidate will be a member of broader Group Finance Execution (GFE) function, consisting of approximately 140 people covering a diverse set of specialized financial disciplines including actuarial, finance, unit pricing and cost management. The role falls within the Investment Solutions (IS) capability of GFE, with specific responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of the Liberty accounting information system (HiPort), as well as the day to day interaction with Standard Bank, Asset Managers and internal downstream teams. There is a strong focus on transforming the Investment Solutions team from production to insight, increasing efficiency, enhancing financial controls, expanding on specialist knowledge and building new capabilities aligned to the Group's Financial Transformation agenda. The role will report into the Manager: Investment Admin and Operations

Qualification & Experience

• Minimum 2 years' experience within investment or institutional operations (asset/investment management, insurance, banking, finance)
• B Com /or equivalent (or studying towards)
• Qualification in accounting will be an added advantage

Key Responsibilities

• Performing checks on HiPort data to ensure that its complete; accurate daily and leading up to monthly accounting periods closures.

• Ensuring new transactions; new market instrument types; new GL group codes pass GL integration and any applicable Downstream system integration
• Facilitating and investigating queries and breaks between Asset Managers and Standard Bank Investor Services
• Performing movement reports and Pnl recons
• Tracking daily and monthly KPIs in terms of the Service Level agreements
• Assisting in annual Service Level Agreement review; where applicable
• Reviewing daily reconciliations from Standard Bank Investor Services
• Reviewing daily and monthly tolerance reports to check for unexplained material market price movements.

Additional Key Responsibilites

Querying and following up with Standard Bank Investor Services where downstream extracts are not received.

• Performing dividend withholding tax extracts and submitting to tax team
• Assisting in maintaining the relationship between Standard Bank Investor Services; Asset Managers and Liberty

• Interacting with other departments within Liberty while carrying out responsibilities
• Assisting with various projects and team initiatives as undertaken by the department
• Continuous updating of job knowledge and identify opportunities to improve execution of deliverables

Skills

• Advanced Microsoft Excel
• Basic understanding of accounting for financial instruments and foreign exchange
• A working knowledge of Hi-Portfolio would be an advantage
• Knowledge of Dividend Withholding Tax (DWT) would be an advantage
• Firm commitment to upholding the Liberty values and behaviours.

Competencies

• Proactive
• Good communication skills (verbal and written)
• Ability to work under pressure
• Attention to detail
• Strong analytical skills
• Ability to follow through on queries until successfully concluded
• Team player