Head of Risk and Control in London

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. 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• Lead the hygiene and uplift of control design and implementation, ensuring controls are clearly defined, consistently documented and effectively embedded within business processes.
• Partner with the Control Utility (Control Assurance function) to ensure strong linkage between control design, control testing outcomes, issue identification and remediation.
• Drive improvements to the control lifecycle, including standardisation, traceability and alignment to risk frameworks.
• 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 risk profile, control effectiveness, issue lifecycle and remediation progress.
• Support engagement with Internal Audit, Risk & Compliance and regulators, ensuring outputs are defensible and aligned to expectations.
• 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.

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.

Qualifications

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