CLIENT SERVICING TEAM LEADER, ASSET MANAGEMENT OPS, £45,000 PLUS EXCELLENT BENS & BONUS, W1
Our client is a leading Global Investment Management firm providing investment management and research services to public and private sector institutional clients, retirement and pension funds, banks, insurance companies and high-net worth individuals. The Company brings together more than three decades of expertise in growth investing with another component of the organisation bringing excellence in value management, as well as being a large and well-respected fixed-income manager. The Company is also one of the world’s largest mutual fund sponsors, with a diverse family of globally distributed mutual fund portfolios. This unique breadth and depth of skills allows them to offer a broad array of products across all major investment disciplines to clients around the world.
Position Description – Client Servicing Team Leader - Ops
The Client Servicing Administration team is primarily responsible for the processing of all transition activity for the EMEA client base. The main components are the timely and accurate processing of the following core client transitional processes: New Account Opening, Account Closures, Custodian Transitions and In Specie Transfers.
The team is also responsible for the opening and maintenance of the local account openings associated with each client mandate. Given the financial, regulatory and reputational implications of errors in such transactional and accounting data, which feed their trading and analytics systems as well as the client reporting systems, this is a key function within Operations and integral to the fund management lifecycle.
The Team Leader is responsible for a team of 2/3 Client Servicing Administrators. The role necessitates constant emphasis on attention to detail and adherence to deadlines but also requires an ability to ensure prompt and appropriate response to a broad range of enquiries from internal and external clients. An understanding of the implications of a Global model is extremely important, as the accounting systems are at the heart of the Company’s systems infrastructure and the impact of any change to data or flow can be fundamental.
Responsibilities/Prime Functions
- Manage a team of Client Servicing Administrators in conjunction with the Client Servicing Manager; recruitment, assessment and provision of training requirements, coaching as well as participation in salary and appraisal process. Encourage a culture of ownership, ideas and escalation.
- Review all client servicing administration errors to establish root cause. Ensure all errors are submitted via ETS within 24 hours of discovery. Review all submissions to ensure they clearly define circumstance, actions taken to resolve, controls that failed and action being taken to avoid recurrence. Monitor such actions to ensure full and proper implementation.
- Participate in custodial meetings as and when required in order to provide feedback on custodian’s performance and receive feedback from the custodian. Where required, take away and implement action points.
- Liaise with sales, portfolio management and core operational teams for ongoing requirements and queries, providing timely and appropriate response. Where such requirements are outside current service provision or cannot be met for other reasons, escalate to the manager for further direction.
- Ensure KPI & MIS data is provided as required.
- Participate in Operational Risk initiatives as required.
- Conduct regular team meetings and individual 1:1’s so as to encourage open and constructive discussion of relevant issues. Also to ensure team members are aware of department and group-wide initiatives and have the opportunity to discuss and clarify.
- Continually assess resource requirements to ensure Service Levels are met whilst optimizing capacity. Enable a process of continuing improvement through the continued challenge of systems and procedures.
- In conjunction with the co-team leader, coordinate the team’s daily workloads, in accordance with the transition activity timetable, identifying/escalating workload issues and working with the Manager to identify solutions.
- Ensure all transitions allocated to the Client Servicing team are processed and completed in a timely manner in accordance with the departmental procedures.
- Review all transition packs completed by the client servicing team to ensure that packs are completed in accordance with procedures and in a timely manner. Review status of all transition packs with the Department Manager on a weekly basis.
- Support client servicing administrators as a point of escalation where necessary or by provision of technical direction.
Skills / Experience required
- IAQ / IMC qualification or FSA ‘grand-fathered’ status
- Proven supervisory experience from within an Investment Operations department or a similar institution, e.g. bank, custodian, broker. Experience in liaising with brokers, custodians and fund accountants.
- Good industry knowledge regarding trade settlements, local settlement practices, corporate actions, foreign exchange, cash and derivatives.
- Experience of financial systems, e.g. SWIFT, Smartstream, Bloomberg, IDC, custodian proprietary systems. Competent user of MS Office suite.
- Strong communication skills, both verbal and oral.
- Flexible approach to a multi-tasking work environment.
