Head of Risk and Control

FTSE Russell is seeking a senior, experienced Head of Risk & Control to lead core first‑line risk processes across the global business and strengthen the consistency, quality and defensibility of risk and control outcomes. This is a Director‑level (GG15) leadership role managing a team of approximately 8–10 professionals across the UK, US and Asia, reporting into the 1LOD Head of Regulatory, Risk & Controls.

The role is central to embedding a scalable, regulator‑credible 1LoD risk and control operating model, ensuring risks, controls and issues are owned, driven and evidenced consistently across the first line.

The Role

You will be accountable for leading the end‑to‑end Risk & Control lifecycle across FTSE Russell, with a focus on ensuring that the core first‑line processes for Issue Management, Risk & Control Self‑Assessment (RCSA), and control design and implementation operate in a consistent, disciplined and scalable manner across the organisation. This includes establishing strong ownership and execution of the Issue Management framework, from the point of issue identification through to remediation and closure, ensuring that issues are accurately captured, appropriately assessed, effectively tracked and subject to robust governance and challenge throughout their lifecycle.

In parallel, you will lead the global RCSA process, driving high‑quality, evidence‑based risk and control assessments, ensuring that outcomes are translated into clear remediation plans and that the process is continuously enhanced to reflect underlying incident, issue and control insights. A core aspect of the role is the ongoing hygiene and uplift of control design and implementation, working closely with business and functional collaborators to ensure that controls are clearly articulated, consistently embedded and aligned to the organisation’s evolving risk profile.

This includes partnering with the Control Utility to ensure that control assurance outcomes are effectively fed back into control design improvements and issue identification, creating a strong and coherent link across the control lifecycle. You will act as the single point of accountability for first‑line risk process execution, ensuring that all activities are aligned to LSEG standards and that processes, controls and governance frameworks are implemented and operated in a manner that is both consistent and regulator‑credible.

This includes establishing clear governance structures, maintaining high‑quality and audit‑ready documentation, and delivering robust management information that provides meaningful insight into risk, control effectiveness and issue health, supporting informed decision‑making by senior management and meeting internal and external regulatory expectations.

Key Responsibilities

• Issue Management Framework (End‑to‑End)
  • Own and manage the end‑to‑end Issue Management framework, including issue identification, triage, assessment, remediation and closure.
  • Ensure consistent application of issue management policies, procedures and controls across FTSE Russell in line with LSEG standards.
  • Establish and maintain robust issue governance, including escalation, challenge and oversight forums.
  • Lead execution monitoring, including remediation tracking, ageing and delivery rigor.
  • Develop and enhance management information (MI) on issue health, including trends, hotspots and systemic risk drivers.
• RCSA (Risk & Control Self‑Assessment)
  • Lead the annual RCSA process globally, ensuring completeness, consistency and quality of risk identification and control assessment.
  • Oversee the translation of RCSA outcomes into actionable remediation, including issue creation and tracking.
  • Ensure RCSA outputs are robust, evidence‑based and aligned to underlying incidents, issues and control performance, supporting Board‑level reporting.
  • Drive continuous improvement of RCSA methodology, cadence and underlying data quality.
• Control Design, Implementation & Uplift
  • Lead the hygiene and uplift of control design and implementation, ensuring controls are:
  • Partner with the Control Utility (Control Assurance function) to ensure strong linkage between:
  • Drive improvements to the control lifecycle, including standardisation, traceability and alignment to risk frameworks.
• Governance, MI & Regulatory Alignment
  • Ensure all risk processes operate with clear governance, defined accountabilities and audit‑ready outputs.
  • Own and develop risk and control MI, providing clear insight on:
  • Support engagement with Internal Audit, Risk & Compliance and regulators, ensuring outputs are defensible and aligned to expectations.
• People Leadership & Global Delivery
  • Lead and develop a globally distributed team, building capability across Issue Management, RCSA and Controls.
  • Establish a consistent operating model across regions, reducing fragmentation and single‑point dependencies.
  • Embed strong risk culture behaviours, including accountability, visibility and proactive identification of risk.

What We’re Looking For

Essential

• Extensive experience in 1LoD risk and control, operational risk, or enterprise risk management within a regulated financial services or market infrastructure environment.
• Deep expertise in all of below:
• Strong understanding of risk governance, regulatory expectations and audit requirements.
• Proven ability to deliver global processes across multiple regions and collaborators.
• Demonstrated people leadership experience, managing and developing high‑performing teams.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to engage senior collaborators.

Desirable

• Experience implementing or operating within large‑scale remediation or transformation programmes.
• Familiarity with MetricStream, Jira or similar risk and issue management tooling.
• Exposure to index, benchmark, data or analytics businesses.
• A solid understanding of benchmark regulation.

Why Join FTSE Russell?

FTSE Russell is a global leader in index and analytics solutions, operating in a highly regulated and client‑critical environment. In this role, you will:

• Shape how risk and control frameworks operate at scale across the first line.
• Drive consistency, transparency and accountability in core risk processes.
• Play a key role in maintaining regulator and client trust.

If you are looking to lead a high‑impact, globally visible risk and control function, we would welcome your application.

Career Stage Director

LSEG Information

Join us and be part of a team that values innovation, quality, and continuous improvement. If you’re ready to take your career to the next level and make a significant impact, we’d love to hear from you. LSEG is a leading global financial markets infrastructure and data provider. Our purpose is driving financial stability, empowering economies and enabling customers to create sustainable growth. Our purpose is the foundation on which our culture is built. Our values of Integrity, Partnership, Excellence and Change underpin our purpose and set the standard for everything we do, every day. They go to the heart of who we are and guide our decision making and everyday actions.

Working with us means that you will be part of a dynamic organisation of 25,000 people across 65 countries. However, we will value your individuality and enable you to bring your true self to work so you can help enrich our diverse workforce. We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer. This means that we do not discriminate on the basis of anyone’s race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, veteran status, pregnancy or disability, or any other basis protected under applicable law. Conforming with applicable law, we can reasonably accommodate applicants’ and employees’ religious practices and beliefs, as well as mental health or physical disability needs.

You will be part of a collaborative and creative culture where we encourage new ideas. We are committed to sustainability across our global business and we are proud to partner with our customers to help them meet their sustainability objectives. Our charity, the LSEG Foundation provides charitable grants to community groups that help people access economic opportunities and build a secure future with financial independence. Colleagues can get involved through fundraising and volunteering. LSEG offers a range of tailored benefits and support, including healthcare, retirement planning, paid volunteering days and wellbeing initiatives.