Strategic Ledger Operations Solution Design Lead - Director (Hybrid) at Citi

Overview of Citi: Citi, the world leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and a presence in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions worldwide. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments, and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management. Citi enables clients to achieve their strategic financial objectives by providing them with cutting-edge ideas, best-in-class products and solutions, and unparalleled access to capital and liquidity.

Team/Function Overview: Citi is going through a multi-year transformation effort to make our operations business best in class, to eliminate identified skills and architecture gaps, and ensure best practice from an operational perspective. The Operational Optimisation and Enablement team exists to facilitate design, implementation and transformation across the wider Operational areas with a view to improving efficiency, execution and client service in current and future states.

Role / Position Overview: We are looking for a Solutions Design Lead for our Strategic Ledger Operations programme of work, which is directly related to consent order deliverables. Reporting into the global Operational Optimisation and Enablement lead, you will be responsible for designing the operational aspects of our Strategic Ledger transformation and managing change from strategy to implementation. The role requires liaison across the Operations footprint to understand interaction with and use cases for ledger activities, shaping and influencing design and roadmap to maximise delivery and ensure manageable transition states and implementation. The successful candidate will demonstrate expertise in both operational content and transformation disciplines, with imagination, curiosity and constructive collaboration to learn, understand and deliver effective solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Co-ordinate and articulate the operations strategy, vision and implementation for the strategic ledger program, with specific focus on October 2024 deliveries for CBNA London branch.
• Drive best practice execution and promote standardization and consistency across wider operations organization.
• Act as Operations-of-last-resort in impact assessment and completeness of end-to-end environment.
• Lead team of 2 Operations Project Management resources to execute on centrally-owned tasks, facilitate execution across wider Operations teams and provide holistic status updates across Operations to program governance forums.
• Ensure any process and technology implementation for the strategic ledger implements end-to-end process solutions meeting Operations' outcomes:

• Safe: Well controlled environment - control framework which is complete, timely, accurate and manageable.
• Efficient: Highly automated - emphasis on STP; no increase in manual work; exception-based processing. Simplified and consistent end-to-end process with clear roles and responsibilities across Operations and Finance.
• Client-centred: Evolves towards same day / real-time operations and visibility (reporting) for Treasury, Operations and clients.
• Functionally complete: Supports both product-level and legal-entity level views. Extensible design to accommodate future change.

Human Skills:

• Leadership & Effective communication.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with experience in presenting complex ideas and solutions to executive stakeholders.
• Strong Stakeholder Management to ensure cross collaborative buy in.
• Proficiency in negotiation to resolve conflicts, reach consensus and manage expectations.
• Problem solving to address challenges and obstacles that arise during implementation, identifying solutions and making informed decisions.
• Experienced leader building and fostering a collaborative team environment, promoting teamwork, trust, and mutual respect.
• Decision making - decisive & data driven to provide clear guidance and alignment.
• Adaptability: Ability to navigate the team through ambiguity and embrace change.
• High emotional intelligence to navigate the team through a complex matrix of stakeholders.

Technical Skills:

• Domain expertise: extensive experience across Operations and Finance functions and tools.
• Expert knowledge in end to end transaction lifecycle process.
• Change management: very significant experience of large, complex implementations and transformation program expertise in finance and or operations.
• Data Migration: Extensive knowledge in migration techniques and tools to ensure seamless transition of data from legacy to new GL platform.
• Process Improvement: Extensive knowledge of process improvement with a proven track record of streamlining operational process.
• General ledger Expertise: deep understanding of GL, systems, their functionalities, and best practice implementing.
• Business Knowledge: deep knowledge of both Markets and Banking products from transaction booking to cash settlement and controls therein.
• Vendor Management: Strong experience in managing software vendors and 3rd party consultant teams.
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to align operational process with organizational strategies, with experience in strategic planning and execution.
• Beneficial to have understanding of Citi-used systems: Genesis, Full Suite, Oracle.

This job description provides a high-level review of the types of work performed. Other job-related duties may be assigned as required.