Director, Head of Service

The Opportunity

Drives and effectively manages the efforts of the Operations Departments: New Business, Underwriting, Policy Admin, Claims, Call Center, Billing & Remittance, supporting business lines relevant to the country. Providing both strategic and tactical direction in accordance with Corporate and Company plans to deliver Corporate and Company goals as well as contributing to the overall business strategy. Promoting sharing of expertise, leverage of scale, operation risk control, development of a differentiated customer service experience, designing and delivering process optimization and innovation and ensuring financial objectives of the Operations and Company are met.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic

• Translates and executes Operations and Country business strategy for the Country Operations Department Heads
• Helps each Department within Operations develop operations strategy in accordance with EMEA’s and the Sub Regional Operations strategy as well as Country business strategy
• Participates in the strategy development of the Country for both Operations and the business
• Lead major transformational projects and initiatives with the aim to deliver a differentiated customer experience, simplify operations with global consistency, strengthen the foundation with an engaged workforce focused on operational risk and professional operating practices and leverage the scale through better knowledge
• Ensures Customer Obsession strategic decisions are taken and implemented; allocates resources and implements projects to sustain the entire company’s strategy
• Monitor, evaluate and sponsor the enhancement of IT systems, in partnership and coordination with the Chief Information Officer

Management

• Lead and motivate the Operational management team to deliver through effective team working; create a culture which constructively engages employees; manage the performance, train and develop colleagues to secure their commitment and competence, and drive performance and results
• Ensure day to day operations of the business are efficiently, effectively and pro-actively managed to relevant internal and external service level agreements (SLAs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) e.g. abandonment rates, turnaround times for all processes, cost control, NPS, claims ratio etc.
• Identify opportunities to leverage cross-departmental strengths to take advantage of new opportunities and/or to address organizational challenges
• Manage the relationships with Operations Outsourced Providers to meet SLAs and KPIs through key relationship owners
• Ensure understanding and adherence to MetLife Code of Conduct and, where appropriate, compliance with all relevant regulatory policies.

Operational

• Accountable for operational performance ensuring operational processes function as required
• Helps each Department develop appropriate targets, priorities and service levels
• Leads continuous improvement/reengineering of processes within the Operations to find and develop actionable plans to increase customer service & operations effectiveness, efficiency, quality, customer satisfaction, and persistency
• Develop budgets of the departments to ensure that plans support the objectives of high quality service to the customers and increased productivity
• Execute plan and maintain operating expense ratio within budgets including strict costs optimization and customer metrics
• Monitor operations financials - provide alerts, information, and advice for resolving undesired variances
• Ensure that appropriate authorizations for approval, operational and financial controls are in place
• Provides input to and agrees on financial goals and measures; analyses financial trends for issues and opportunities from an Operations perspective
• Develop and manage priorities under the operations to support the business objectives and plans in a risk-controlled environment
• Ensures compliance with all regulatory, corporate and internal procedures

People

• Identifies and develops talent, assures succession planning to keep the business continuity
• Ensure effective communication between management and members of operations departments
• Train, coach, manage, develop and retain staff as are required

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of large-scale Life and/or Medical insurance operations experience, covering individual and group lines. Scale can be smaller depending on the country.
• Senior leadership of a direct service organisation across New Business, Underwriting, Policy Services, Claims, Call Centre, and Billing & Remittance. The candidate should have delivered against SLAs and KPIs such as turnaround times, abandonment rates, NPS, and cost.
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