Head of Operational Risk Oversight

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.

Closing Date: 30.5.25

Salary and benefits: Up to £140,000 dependant upon experience, plus bonus potential, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

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.

What are we looking for? We’re looking for a strategic, experienced, and collaborative risk leader to help us enhance and embed our Group-wide Risk Management and Internal Control Frameworks—ensuring we continue to deliver for our customers while managing risk effectively and responsibly.

Key Responsibilities:

• Advise, guide, and challenge the business on the Risk Management Framework, including risk appetite, policies, controls, KRIs, and Solvency II.
• Provide oversight and independent opinion on the integrated risk and control framework across all financial and non-financial risks and controls in the Groups Risk Universe.
• Act as a trusted partner to senior stakeholders, influencing decision-making and promoting good risk culture.
• Advising on and influencing strategic decisions.
• Providing well-evidenced independent risk opinions to senior committees, including the Executive and Board.
• Represent risk perspectives clearly and credibly at senior governance forums, ensuring robust independent challenge where needed.
• Representing Phoenix in key regulatory and industry forums.
• Leading a high-performing team, driving strategic risk engagement across the organisation.
• Deputise for the Non-Financial Risk Director as required.

What We’re Looking For:

• You’ll bring a strong blend of technical knowledge, leadership experience, and strategic thinking.
• Proven experience leading teams to deliver complex risk oversight, advice, and assurance.
• Expertise across a broad spectrum of operational risk types.
• A confident communicator, comfortable operating with autonomy and influencing at executive and Board level.
• Demonstrated ability to plan and manage workloads to time, cost, and quality targets.
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced and evolving environment, navigating ambiguity and driving change.

Essential Criteria:

• Proven track record providing risk leadership, oversight and independent opinion on the integrated risk and control framework across financial and non-financial risks and controls.
• Proven strategic thinker and creative problem solver with the ability to analyse and synthesise sophisticated issues, focus on material risk issues, connect to the Group strategy and identify commercial solutions.
• High level of impact and influence. Highly skilled at maintaining effective cross-functional networks and engagements, constructively challenge, influence and guide stakeholders, including at C suite and Director level.
• Ability to operate with significant autonomy and lead a value adding team in managing and undertaking regulatory and other risk assessments of relevant business areas.
• Specialism in understanding and embedding Risk Management Frameworks, including risk appetite, policies, controls, KRIs, and Solvency II.
• Adapts communications to a variety of situations, audiences and contexts and coaches others to do the same.
• Uses communication vehicles strategically to influence, gain support and drive internal risk transparency.

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.

Please note that we reserve the right to remove adverts earlier than the advertised closing date. We encourage you to apply at the earliest opportunity.