UK Transfer Agency (UKTA) Head of Operations
On-siteLondon, England, United Kingdom
Job Summary
Lead UKTA Operations to ensure sustained delivery of service standards, KPIs, and client commitments across dealing, registration, settlement, distributions, and investor servicing. Drive the evolution of the regional operating model by scaling processes, implementing automation, and delivering strategic change initiatives. Maintain a robust control environment by identifying, assessing, and remediating risks, incidents, and audit findings in line with governance expectations. Ensure operational processes remain aligned with regulatory obligations including CASS, AML/FCC, Consumer Duty, and data privacy. Act as a senior escalation point for regulatory, operational, and service-critical matters, ensuring urgent decisions are framed, documented, and resolved. Support business continuity activities, manage outages, and lead recovery discipline for SLA-critical incidents. Provide leadership and coaching to multi-location operational teams while conducting performance management and succession planning. Own workforce planning, budget discipline, and recruitment input for UKTA Operations. Represent UKTA in internal governance forums, client meetings, and external industry events.
Required Qualifications
- Senior operational leadership
- Significant experience in Transfer Agency, fund administration, asset servicing, investment operations or a comparable regulated financial services environment
- Detailed understanding of end-to-end Transfer Agency operational processes, including dealing, registration, settlement, distributions, commissions, investor servicing and operational oversight
- Strong knowledge of collective investment schemes, Authorised Contractual Schemes, Long Term Asset Funds and relevant regulatory frameworks, including CASS, AML/FCC, Consumer Duty, operational resilience and data privacy
- Proven ability to lead, develop and scale large multi-location operations teams, including senior managers and specialist individual contributors
- Strong judgement in operational risk, issue management, incident resolution, root cause analysis and control remediation, with the ability to operate effectively under pressure
- Track record of delivering operating model change, process improvement, automation, workflow enhancement, technology adoption or cross-jurisdiction programme delivery
- Strong stakeholder management, presentation and communication skills, with experience engaging senior leadership, clients, auditors, regulators, oversight teams and offshore or nearshore partners
- Ability to manage resources, budgets, capacity, workforce planning and service priorities in a controlled and commercially effective manner
- Familiarity with Transfer Agency platforms, workflow tools, client servicing systems and reporting solutions
- Strong understanding of payment, settlement, reconciliation, investor record keeping and operational data processes
- Demonstrated ability to use MI, dashboards, KPI/KRI reporting and trend analysis to manage service, risk, capacity and efficiency
- Working knowledge of automation, workflow improvement, control design and operational process optimisation
- Degree-level education or equivalent industry experience
- Right to work in the United Kingdom at the time of application and for the duration of employment
Desired Qualifications
- Relevant financial services, Transfer Agency, fund administration, risk, compliance or investment operations qualifications
- Project, change, Lean, Six Sigma, Agile or process improvement qualifications
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