Senior Manager - Offshore Fund Accounting at Apex Group

Summary of the position

• The Senior Manager, UK Operations – Open Ended Funds (GSC) role involves functional leadership for all clients, funds, and portfolio-specific processes involved in the end-to-end administration of UK-domiciled funds as serviced from South Africa on Invest One accounting system which includes regulated and listed funds.
• This position is responsible for managing, measuring, and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the UK business unit within the SA Open Ended operations, ensuring the timely and compliant delivery of services to the UK administrator, appointed Manco, depositories and external clients in accordance with regulatory standards.

The services and oversight responsibilities associated with this position primarily include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Trade Processing and Trade Confirmations & Settlements services involve trade capture in NXM and Invest One, live trade confirmation and settlement through the OMGEO/STP Confirms app, and managing trade exceptions based on client trade source files via X-Ceptor.
• Overseeing the integration of trade files across various systems to ensure that all received instructions are accounted for in valuations.
• Oversight of market data activities, including security setup, security valuations, and corporate actions processing.
• Supervision of daily cash and scrip reconciliations services, ensuring regular monitoring of discrepancies and resolution of aged or material items.
• NAV valuation and accounting activities include processing contributions and withdrawals, calculating fee accruals, and determining both estimated and actual income distribution rates as part of the NAV price calculations. Additionally, this involves performing NAV reviews, managing exceptions, and preparing monthly and ad-hoc invoices for payment by the depository in line with the SLA.
• Fund reporting activities include preparation of trustee reconciliation packs for all regulated funds within agreed SLA timeframes and distributing the reconciliation packs to the depository, addressing queries related to trustee certificates and letters, and preparing board papers as required.
• Managing the relationship with UK entities serviced by SA, ensuring consistent collaboration and oversight reporting to the UK-based operations teams and escalations as required.
• Ensuring that errors are promptly identified, escalated to all relevant parties, and managed in compliance with the SLA and FCA – COLL guidelines.
• Engagement with local operations and ICT teams to enhance operational efficiencies and services.
• Ensuring compliance with risk management policies and practices to meet both Group and local requirement.
• Ensuring monthly KPI reports are produced with input from respective operational stakeholders and shared with UK.
• Overseeing the issue and actions log to ensure open actions are resolved and items discussed in service meetings.
• Overseeing timely and effective responses to warehouse reporting queries related to UK funds.

Outline of main duties and responsibilities

The Senior Manager, UK Operations – Open Ended Funds (GSC) will be expected to:

• Provide strategic leadership to the business unit, ensuring close collaboration and alignment of the operating model between the UK and SA, as well as within the Open-Ended product across jurisdictions
• Drive the continued development of the UK business within the SA global service center, enhancing the efficiency of centralized operational services to accommodate the onboarding of more clients in SA.
• Act as the primary accountable owner for the service quality of the UK business unit, overseeing both external and internal client relations, and handling any significant escalations from clients regarding service delivery.
• Drive the implementation of further efficiencies in the operational area by improving the technical skills of people, improving the controls of processes, and increasing the automation of operations with technology.
• Drive the implementation of improvements in the way of work within the new combined UK Operational team, striving for a frictionless communication process within the team that results in minimal delays in handoffs and response between individuals.
• Drive the implementation of an operational quality control framework in the business unit in line with the functional and regulatory requirements and in order to minimize operational risk.
• Ensure the delivery of high service quality standards to both external and internal clients in line with the agreed SLA, by organizing regular meetings between internal teams and between SA and UK, tracking and resolving open items, keeping breach registers up to date, and responding to client satisfaction feedback.
• Ensure service delivery issues and challenges in the business unit are managed and dealt with in a timely and efficient manner.
• Ensure adherence to all operational controls, policies, and standard operating procedures relevant to the UK business unit.
• Develop strong and trusted relationships with external and internal clients and set and maintain standard for the quality of the business unit's engagement with clients.
• Monitor operational risk for the business unit respective teams by ensuring incidents are managed and dealt with in a timely and efficient manner.
• Demonstrate technical and management leadership in the subject of various services and be a key representative of Apex on this with external and internal clients.
• Implement internal controls to strengthen control framework and to reduce operational and business risks for the business unit.
• Ensure audit findings and depository queries relating to this business unit are appropriately responded to and addressed in a timely manner.
• Ensure UK clients are accurately and timeously invoiced to ensure alignment with budgets.
• Ensure experienced staff are recruited at Manager and lower level in this business unit to discharge daily functional activities of their responsible teams to meet SLA.
• Manage and build out key performance indicators (‘KPIs’), targets and measures of success for the business unit and manage performance against these; and deliver towards them.
• Produce monthly management reporting packs for UK Operations department to the Regional Head – Fund Accounting (Africa) detailing key performance indicators for your area.

Skills and experience required

• Extensive operational leadership experience within the broader Open-Ended product and/or Financial Services industry, with a minimum of 3 years’ experience working with UK-domiciled funds.
• At least 8 years of work experience in the Open-Ended product sector and a minimum of a bachelor’s degree.
• • A relevant accounting qualification (e.g., CA, ACCA, CIMA) or an equivalent investment management qualification (e.g., CFA) is advantageous.
• Proven leadership qualities with a minimum of 3 years of direct or indirect management experience, demonstrating the ability to lead various operational teams and ensure the achievement of departmental strategic targets and objectives.
• Strong project management capability with a practical hands-on approach and the ability to ‘get things done’;
• Strong business acumen with excellent numeracy, logical and analytical approaches, with the ability to work and manage deliverables independently.
• Strong technical knowledge of the middle and back-office services and processes, and a good understanding of the upstream and downstream processes and risks.
• Specific technical knowledge of the UK Open-Ended fund administration SLA and operational process and reporting requirements would be advantageous.
• The ability to design new processes and conceptualize and assist in the development of systems to support those processes.
• Prior experience in liaising with internal and external clients under outsourcing arrangements.
• Previous experience in managing, developing and motivating teams and driving a high-performance culture.
• Experience in managing large teams both local and remote.