Head of Operations

Overview

Location

Status

Role Purpose

Key Responsibilities

• Own client onboarding operations, account opening workflow, verification coordination, and operational throughput.
• Oversee platform operations, trade support, cash movements, reconciliations, and exception handling.
• Manage outsourcing relationships with brokers, custodians, technology vendors, payment providers, and support partners.
• Monitor SLAs, service incidents, backlog levels, and operational performance metrics.
• Lead business continuity planning, disaster recovery arrangements, and resilience testing.
• Coordinate operational implementation of regulatory or internal change projects.
• Maintain operational MI and dashboards for senior management and board review.
• Lead root-cause analysis for operational incidents, control breaks, and process failures.
• Ensure documented handoffs and controls exist across all critical workflows, especially where services are outsourced.
• Regulatory accountability
• Maintain an operating model that supports safe retail client servicing, onboarding, trading, payments, reconciliations, and support.
• Ensure all outsourced and interdependent service providers are governed through clear SLAs, oversight routines, escalation paths, and documented controls.
• Maintain operational readiness for new client phases, product launches, or platform expansions.
• Ensure the firm can evidence operational resilience, incident response, and recovery capability to internal governance and regulators.
• Provide board-ready reporting on capacity, service quality, incidents, remediation, and operational risk trends.
• Reserved matters and escalation rights
• No new client growth phase may proceed without documented operational readiness sign-off.
• No new vendor, platform integration, or outsourced critical service may go live without testing, control validation, and approval.
• Material operational incidents, repeated SLA breaches, failed reconciliations, or control gaps must be escalated immediately to senior management and relevant committees.
• The Head of Operations may recommend suspension of onboarding, trading, or service activity where operational risk is not acceptably controlled.
• Material resilience or continuity weaknesses must be reported with remediation timelines and ownership.
• Operational evidence supporting regulator-facing submissions must be reviewed and approved through the firmʼs governance process.
• Interfaces with Compliance:
• Operations owns execution, process control, resilience, and service delivery.
• Compliance owns regulatory interpretation, compliance monitoring, policy advice, and challenge.
• The Head of Operations should partner with Compliance on client onboarding controls, complaints routing, breach escalation, and regulatory change implementation.
• Candidate profile:
• Must have
• 10+ years in operations leadership within regulated financial services, fintech, wealth management, asset management, or retail investment platforms;
• 5+ years at Head of Operations / COO level in a client-facing regulated environment; strong track record of scaling operations through growth phases;
• Deep experience with outsourcing governance, broker/custodian relationships, and operational resilience;
• Strong governance, reporting, stakeholder management, and issue-resolution skills.
• Nice to have:
• Experience in ADGM or DIFC regulated environments;
• Familiarity with Islamic finance operational requirements;
• Experience with virtual assets operational infrastructure;
• Arabic language skills.