If you’re a collaborative and proactive Investment Operations professional who is skilled in interpreting unit‑linked or fund‑related data, with the confidence to communicate complex operational information clearly, our Retirement Solutions & Asset Management Investment Operations team would love to meet you.
Job Type: 9 months FTC / Secondment
Location: This role can be based in either of our Midlands offices (Telford / Birmingham) or Edinburgh. The team spend 3 core days in the office and 2 days working flexibly from home or in the office, per week, depending on business needs. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process.
Career Family & Level: Investment Operations: Specialist Band 2
Salary & Benefits: from £40,000 (subject to experience) + bonus, 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 Team
Our Investment Operations team are responsible for the administration of around 5,000 unit-linked and with-profits funds with over 17,000 pricing series linked to them. On a daily basis, Investment Operations are responsible for oversight of fund accounting and unit pricing, unit matching and box management, trade and settlement processing, validating and overseeing instructions from Standard Life’s Portfolio Management team, and maintaining the data that underpins all our fund-related activities.
The Role
In this role, you’ll need to apply your technical skills and experience to a range of regular core tasks whilst working with colleagues across our Investment Operations teams define what and how we deliver our services to customers across the business. This will be a varied role so you’ll need to be able to adapt quickly as focus shifts between the core deliverables of Investment Operations.
You’ll need to be able to build on your existing investment operations expertise to quickly become a technical expert on how we administer our funds – we’ll make sure you’re fully supported on this. It’s critical that your comfortable challenging how things are done, finding solutions to problems, and guiding others around you to do the same.
Key Responsibilities
1. Build upon strong expertise in Investment Operations, particularly fund administration, pricing, box management and fund activity, ensuring accurate and safe delivery while supporting others to develop their understanding.
2. Plan, oversee and take ownership of team deliverables, contributing to effective prioritisation and ensuring activities are delivered accurately and on time using specialist knowledge where required.
3. Drive continuous improvement initiatives, identifying efficiencies, enhancing ways of working, and encouraging a culture where improvement and challenge are embedded.
4. Manage key internal and external stakeholder relationships, working confidently with partners and suppliers to resolve issues, align priorities, and deliver positive outcomes for customers.
5. Apply strong operational risk awareness, ensuring appropriate controls are followed, issues are identified early, and risks are managed effectively.
6. Use data and insight to support decision‑making, responding to ad‑hoc requests and complex issues with clear, well‑reasoned analysis.
7. Communicate confidently with stakeholders at varying levels of seniority, clearly explaining complex or technical matters and representing Investment Operations with credibility.
What we're looking for
8. In-depth knowledge of Investment Operations functions covering unit-linked fund administration processes (including unit pricing, unit matching, box management and trading).
9. Understanding of outsourced fund administration service provision, and necessary oversight of that service.
10. Understanding of fund hierarchies and fund data structures.
11. Proven ability to communicate complicated technical content to stakeholders at all levels.
12. Strong Excel skills with demonstrated experience working with data - if you’ve started exploring VBA, that’s a bonus, not a must‑have.
We want to hire the whole version of you.
We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you.
If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.
We’re reviewing applications as they come in, so apply early to avoid missing out.