About My Client
My client believes that everyone should be able to access, understand, and manage their money with confidence. Their ambition is to improve lives by providing clarity, intelligence, and technology that empowers individuals to make smarter financial decisions. While they are an emerging organisation, they have built a highly capable team and have ambitious plans for continued growth.
My client designs products to simplify financial decision-making and provide customers with greater control and flexibility. Their solutions help customers maximise their financial position and spend less time worrying about money, allowing them to focus on what matters most.
About the Role
My client is seeking a highly capable Operational Risk and Incident professional to take ownership of their enterprise-wide Risk Event and Incident Management process. This role sits within the Second Line of Defence, supporting the Chief Risk Officer (CRO) in ensuring the identification, escalation, governance, and remediation of risk events across the organisation.
The scope is broad and covers multiple areas including Operations, Finance, Product, Commercial, Credit Risk, Data, and Technology.
This individual will act as a central coordination and control point, ensuring risk events and incidents are properly understood, prioritised, analysed, and remediated in a way that protects customers, supports commercial objectives, and meets regulatory expectations.
This is a highly visible role involving direct engagement with senior leadership, including presenting reporting and insights to the Executive Risk Committee.
Key Responsibilities
Risk Event & Incident Lifecycle Management
* Own the end-to-end lifecycle of risk events and incidents, ensuring timely logging, classification, investigation, and closure
* Maintain consistent approaches to impact assessment and severity ratings aligned with internal thresholds and regulatory expectations
* Ensure high-quality root cause analysis, identifying control gaps, process failures, and behavioural or cultural drivers
* Translate complex incidents into structured, evidence-based records suitable for audit and regulatory scrutiny
Prioritisation, Coordination & Orchestration
* Coordinate cross-functional responses involving Product, Technology, Data, Operations, Credit, Commercial, Finance, and Compliance teams
* Prioritise effort and resources, particularly where multiple concurrent incidents are occurring
* Apply judgement to recommend escalation pathways, response timing, and closure criteria
* Drive accountability and ensure remediation actions are completed while balancing operational realities
Governance, Reporting & Executive Visibility
* Produce reporting packs for senior leadership and the CRO, including trend analysis, thematic insights, and forward-looking risk views
* Present analysis and findings to the Executive Risk Committee
* Maintain strong audit trails and documentation to support internal audit, external audit, and regulatory requirements
* Escalate emerging or material risks promptly with clear impact assessments and recommended actions
Insights, Themes & Continuous Improvement
* Identify patterns and recurring control weaknesses across risk events
* Support the development of Key Risk Indicators (KRIs), dashboards, and management information
* Recommend practical improvements aligned with risk appetite, customer outcomes, and commercial priorities
* Promote proactive risk awareness and preventative behaviours across the organisation
Policy, Process & Framework Support
* Strengthen and embed the Risk Event and Incident Management framework, including taxonomy, thresholds, and escalation paths
* Support adoption and integration of risk processes into business-as-usual activities
* Contribute to process optimisation, workflow improvements, and system enhancements
What Success Looks Like
* Risk events and incidents are managed consistently, efficiently, and effectively
* Remediation actions are delivered on time and result in meaningful improvements
* Senior leadership trusts the quality and clarity of risk insight and reporting
* Emerging themes and risks are identified and addressed proactively
* Operational risk maturity improves across the organisation
* Customer outcomes and commercial objectives are protected
Regulatory & Conduct Expectations
My client maintains a strong culture of regulatory compliance and customer protection. In this role, the successful candidate will be expected to:
* Act with integrity
* Demonstrate due skill, care, and diligence
* Maintain open and cooperative relationships with regulators
* Act in the best interests of customers and treat them fairly
* Uphold appropriate standards of market conduct
About the Candidate
Experience & Knowledge
* Strong understanding of operational risk frameworks, incident management, and root cause analysis methodologies
* Proven experience managing end-to-end risk events in fast-paced environments
* Experience coordinating remediation across cross-functional teams
* Experience producing reporting and presenting insights to senior stakeholders and executive committees
* Understanding of customer, regulatory, commercial, and control impacts when assessing incidents
* Experience within consumer finance, credit cards, lending, or related financial services environments
* Familiarity with technical and operational incidents, including system outages, data issues, or processing failures
* Exposure to operational resilience concepts such as important business services and disruption management
* Experience using risk tools, data, and analytics platforms to support decision-making
Skills & Mindset
* Strategic and holistic thinker, able to connect risk across systems and processes
* Commercially pragmatic, balancing risk management with business needs
* Highly organised and able to manage multiple priorities simultaneously
* Strong communicator with the ability to influence and challenge constructively
* Comfortable analysing data and identifying trends and insights
* Calm and effective when managing live incidents
Personal Qualities
* Collaborative and relationship-focused team player
* Pragmatic and outcome-focused
* Curious and analytical
* Professional and credible with senior stakeholders
* Proactive and takes ownership