Manager, GWAM Operational Resilience

In today’s rapidly evolving financial services landscape, operational resilience is paramount. It encompasses the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions. As financial institutions face increasing threats from cyber incidents, natural disasters, and regulatory changes, maintaining operational resilience is crucial to safeguarding critical operations and ensuring business continuity.

We seek an experienced manager to assist in the business continuity management (BCM) and resilience of GWAM’s critical processes, ensuring Manulife meets its service commitments to customers and regulators. This role involves executing on strategies to protect essential services and operations. By managing risk and fostering preparedness, this manager will ensure our business segment thrives during challenges and maintains customer, stakeholder, and regulator trust.

Position Responsibilities:

Vision and Strategy

• Executing a BCM and operational resilience strategy for GWAM to meet resilience objectives set by enterprise standard and regulator requirements.

• Assist in leading and inspiring multidisciplinary operational resilience and BCM professionals to drive resilience outcome.

• Assist in continuously assessing and refining BCM, operational resilience strategies and execution approach through rigorous analysis and feedback, leveraging metrics and insights from execution to make informed improvements.

• Manage relationship with cross-functional stakeholders to address issues, develop strategy, advocate for change, and implement solutions.

• Will manage a team of analysts.

Critical Operations Identification, Assessment, and Improvements

• Assist in establishing, execution and management of GWAM’s operational resilience governance model and deliverables.

• Identify GWAM’s critical operations leveraging the enterprise approach.

• Assist in continuously monitoring internal and external factors to re-evaluate inventory of critical operations and associated actions required.

• Participate in analysis of critical operations including defining scope of critical operations, impact tolerance, end-to-end mapping of assets required for running of critical operations (people, location, technology, process, 3rd party), identify material points of failure, develop action plans to remediate vulnerabilities, and test readiness of critical operations through severe but plausible scenarios.

• Partner with critical operations owners, Operational Resilience Office, and enable programs (TPRM, Disaster Recovery, etc) to align, execute, and monitor progress on remediation actions.

• Assist in developing, tracking, and monitoring KPIs and KRIs on GWAM’s operational resilience progress and posture.

Maintain Robust Business Continuity Plan

• Assist in leading and managing a team to develop and maintain GWAM’s business continuity plans (BCP), improving completeness and quality of BCP for critical and non-critical processes.

• Facilitate and lead regular testing and simulation exercises to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of BCPs.

• Ensure BCPs are reflective of critical operations considerations, where applicable, including impact tolerance and material points of failure.

Ensure Exit Plans for Critical Third Parties are Maintained and Tested

• Assist in leading and managing the validation of critical third parties for GWAM as part of critical operations analysis.

• Partner with third party relationship owners to develop and maintain exit plans for critical third parties.

• Conduct simulation exercise to ensure the feasibility and effectiveness of exit plans.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in business administration, strategy, operations management, or a related field. Master’s degree preferred.

• 3-5+ years of experience in Wealth and Asset Management, with 2+ years in Operations management role. Prior experience in global role preferred.

• Proven track record in delivering complex, cross-functional, and time sensitive programs that meets business goals and regulatory expectations.

• Strong leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to inspire, motivate, and mentor a diverse and distributed team.

• Experience with leading high performing teams including coaching and developing people.

• Strong understanding of financial services’ regulations and ability to partner with internal stakeholders, including Compliance and Risk functions.

• Strong knowledge o