Senior Accountant

Job Type: Permanent

Location: Birmingham, Edinburgh, Telford or London offices - Hybrid, up to 3 days per week in the office

Flexible working: Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process. You can read more about flexible working here.

Closing Date: 27th July (23:55)

Salary and benefits: £62,000 - £80,000 per annum (dependant on experience) plus an indicative bonus range of 16% - 32%, 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 role

As a Balance Sheet Management Senior Accountant you will be a member of the extended leadership team, you will play a key role in the new Standard Life Accounting Operations Centre, reporting directly into the Operational Reporting & Controls Manager. Your role as a Senior Accountant will be to work collaboratively with your Manager and other Senior Accountants in your team to define the vision and strategy for the team, and then to implement that vision for your sub-team. This will include ensuring that you have an in depth understanding of the needs of your stakeholders, consistent timely delivery of high quality outputs, delivering BAU and in flight change safely, maintaining a strong control framework and transforming core business processes to improve efficiency.

Key responsibilities

• Full responsibility for monitoring and reporting on the health of the balance sheets for all legal entities within the group.
• Accountability for all general ledger reconciliations (policyholder, reinsurance, investments, expenses etc.), providing assurance that all balances are appropriately supported, implementing new methods of monitoring aging of balances and measuring balance sheet risk.
• Accelerate the production of balance sheet reconciliations via data cleanse, automation and use of workflow tooling.
• Review and improve key controls and control evidence relating to balance sheet management.
• Drive the centralisation of reconciliations into a single team, owning the e2e process for centralisation including gathering requirements, designing and implementing solutions, stakeholder management and business readiness.
• Designing and implementing new tooling under the banner of the AFTP programme which will enable automation of reconciliation processes, enhanced oversight of reconciliations completed by outsourcers and new reports which enable the team to effectively manage balance sheet risk.
• Delivery lead for the AFTP implementation, representing the Operational Reporting & Controls Manager and the Head of the Accounting Operations Centre in AFTP project forums. In this role you will ensure that the change teams pay proper regard to the requirements of the business including our RAID and channel communications between the change and BAU teams, escalating for support when needed.
• Ensuring that the AFTP solution design is as simple and cost effective as possible, focusing on standardisation of input data over the creation of multiple, bespoke reconciliation rules.
• Managing a variety of stakeholders (both internal and external) to source, interpret and challenge balance sheet reconciliation data and reporting.
• Design and implementation of new dashboard and reporting outputs that will provide downstream customers and senior stakeholders with insights into the health of the balance sheet and assurance that controls are operating effectively.
• Develop your team such that they become subject matter experts, with an in depth understanding of the group balance sheets, patterns and trends in balance sheet movements and a full understanding of potential balance sheet risk factors to the group.
• Developing your new team to ensure that they have the capability to review and challenge large volumes of balance sheet related data, identify and resolve accounting issues, investigate issues and make recommendations on how to improve the health of the balance sheet and to deliver high quality outputs in short timescales.

What are we looking for?

• In depth knowledge of operational accounting processes and key areas of challenge
• Knowledge and experience of change delivery
• Knowledge of general ledger and source data interrogation
• Detailed understanding of all dimensions in the general ledger and the attributes within them e.g. nominal, entity fund, product, interco etc.
• Detailed understanding of the Standard Life reporting hierarchies
• Knowledge of IFRS, SII and UK GAAP technical accounting and the Group Accounting Manual
• Demonstratable post qualification experience in the financial services industry
• Proven track record of building relationships and effectively managing stakeholders
• Experience of managing BAU in parallel with implementing change
• Experience of managing and developing people
• Ability to analyse financial results, identify key areas of risk and interrogate data to identify and resolve root cause issues
• Report writing experience, demonstrating an ability to produce well written, analytical reports that can be used to support decision making.
• Building new reports supporting the review and analysis of general ledger data.
• Fully qualified accountant

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.

Find Out More About Working At Standard Life

• Guide for Candidates: standardlifeplc.pagetiger.com/guideforcandidates
• Find or get answers from our colleagues: www.standardlifeplc.com/careers/talk-to-us