Job Description

Job Type: Permanent

Location: Birmingham, Edinburgh, Telford, or London offices - Hybrid, up to 3 days per week in the office

Flexible working: All 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. You can read more about flexible working here.

Closing Date: 27th July (23:55)

Salary and benefits: £62,000 - £80,000 per annum (dependant on experience) plus an indicative bonus range of 16% - 32%, 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’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.

Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain, and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments, and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust, and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return, we expect curiosity, connection, accountability, and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.

The role

As a Balance Sheet Management Senior Accountant, you will be a member of the extended leadership team, playing a key role in the new Standard Life Accounting Operations Centre, reporting directly into the Operational Reporting & Controls Manager. Your role as a Senior Accountant will be to work collaboratively with your Manager and other Senior Accountants in your team to define the vision and strategy for the team, and then to implement that vision for your sub-team. This will include ensuring that you have an in-depth understanding of the needs of your stakeholders, consistent timely delivery of high-quality outputs, delivering BAU and in-flight change safely, maintaining a strong control framework, and transforming core business processes to improve efficiency.

Key responsibilities

• Full responsibility for monitoring and reporting on the health of the balance sheets for all legal entities within the group.
• Accountability for all general ledger reconciliations (policyholder, reinsurance, investments, expenses, etc.), providing assurance that all balances are appropriately supported, implementing new methods of monitoring aging of balances, and measuring balance sheet risk.
• Accelerate the production of balance sheet reconciliations via data cleanse, automation, and use of workflow tooling.
• Review and improve key controls and control evidence relating to balance sheet management.
• Drive the centralisation of reconciliations into a single team, owning the end-to-end process for centralisation including gathering requirements, designing and implementing solutions, stakeholder management, and business readiness.
• Designing and implementing new tooling under the banner of the AFTP programme which will enable automation of reconciliation processes, enhanced oversight of reconciliations completed by outsourcers, and new reports which enable the team to effectively manage balance sheet risk.
• Delivery lead for the AFTP implementation, representing the Operational Reporting & Controls Manager and the Head of the Accounting Operations Centre in AFTP project forums. In this role, you will ensure that the change teams pay proper regard to the requirements of the business including our RAID and channel communications between the change and BAU teams, escalating for support when needed.
• Ensuring that the AFTP solution design is as simple and cost-effective as possible, focusing on standardisation of input data over the creation of multiple, bespoke reconciliation rules.
• Managing a variety of stakeholders (both internal and external) to source, interpret, and challenge balance sheet reconciliation data and reporting.
• Design and implementation of new dashboard and reporting outputs that will provide downstream customers and senior stakeholders with insights into the health of the balance sheet and assurance that controls are operating effectively.
• Develop your team such that they become subject matter experts, with an in-depth understanding of the group balance sheets, patterns, and trends in balance sheet movements, and a full understanding of potential balance sheet risk factors to the group.
• Developing your new team to ensure that they have the capability to review and challenge large volumes of balance sheet-related data, identify and resolve accounting issues, investigate issues, and make recommendations on how to improve the health of the balance sheet and to deliver high-quality outputs in short timescales.