Mandate Monitoring Analyst

Salary & Benefits: £35,000 - 55,000 (subject to experience) + Asset Management bonus, excellent pension scheme, private medical insurance, electric vehicle scheme, 38 days holiday incl. Bank Holidays (pro-rated), plus 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more!

Job Type: Permanent

Hiring Manager:  Head of AM Portfolio & Regulatory Compliance, BC&G Asset Management

Location: This role will be based in either our Wythall / Edinburgh office, with some time spent working from home. You can read more about Phoenix Flex here.

We have an incredible opportunity to join us here at Phoenix Group as a Mandate Monitoring Analyst to join our Line 1 Asset Management Portfolio Compliance Team.

Who are we?

We want to be the best place that any of our 6,800 colleagues have ever worked.

We’re the UK’s largest long-term savings and retirement business. We offer our 12 million customers products across our market-leading brands, including Standard Life, SunLife and ReAssure, with c.£259 billion of assets under administration. We’re a FTSE 100 organisation that is tackling key issues such as transitioning our portfolio to net zero by 2050, and we’re not done yet.

The Role

The incumbent  will sit within AM Portfolio Compliance, which is part of Phoenix Asset Management’s Business Control and Governance (BC&G) team. Established as a Line 1 control, the team is responsible for delivering compliance support capability to assist Phoenix Group’s exciting investment strategy.

You will be joining a newly established team who are shaping the foundation of the Phoenix Portfolio Compliance operations in preparation for further integration and growth of the company. The team acts to ensure adherence to investment compliance requirements, including those prescribed in their Prospectus or IMA documents, adherence with the relevant Directives.

You will play a key role in operationalising investment compliance controls including coding pre- and post-trade portfolio restrictions and related compliance monitoring; threshold positions monitoring and compliance screening of investments against Anti-Money Laundering and International Control & Sanctions lists. The role is key to support the delivery of portfolio analytics and advice to Phoenix Investment teams, BC&G, and other functions across AM and you will work alongside various other teams including second-line Compliance.

Key Responsibilities

Compliance

• Investigation of allocated overnight compliance violations generated by the daily overnight compliance batch run within the Aladdin system.
• Communication of Aladdin overnight compliance violations to the relevant portfolio management teams and external asset managers.
• Thorough documentation of overnight compliance violation causes and reasoning within the Aladdin compliance systems dashboard for audit trail.
• Assisting the team in producing detailed documentation of compliance rule test results

Investment Guidelines

• Providing assistance to the Portfolio Compliance team in keeping track of open guideline breaches and communicating with the relevant portfolio management teams.
• Conducting manual monitoring tasks performed outside of the Aladdin system.
• Under the supervision of the Senior Portfolio Compliance Officer, identification, and extraction of investment guidelines from legal source documents.

Aladdin System

• Work towards developing an understanding of how to independently code Compliance Rules into BlackRock Aladdin system using BQL and pre-defined set of standard asset type/class macros.
• Work with the Senior Portfolio Compliance Officer to test Aladdin compliance rules using detailed pre and post-trade test scenarios.

Clients & Counterparties

• Daily monitoring and submission of Substantial Shareholding, Takeover Panel and short-selling disclosures and regulatory positions requests (e.g. CFTC Form 40)
• Screening and assessment of counterparties and investments against AML lists
• Timely preparation of responses to periodic client certifications and client questionnaires.

Improving Processes

• Proactively identify process improvement and risk mitigation opportunities within the function and work effectively with management, Technology, and other groups to effect enhancements as appropriate.
• Participate in local and global projects to improve service levels to the front office and improve the overall effectiveness of surveillance systems and process/procedures.

What we're looking for

Minimum Requirements

Experience (Essential)

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills; ability to securely manage and analyse large quantities of data to understand cause and effect relationships.
• Experience in interpreting legal document language
• Proficient use of MS Excel, Word, PowerPoint.

Desirable

• Understanding of security classification data, Reuters, Bloomberg etc and how it is conceptually utilised for investment guideline monitoring purposes
• Understanding of financial instruments across asset classes in the investment compliance monitoring context, including equity, fixed income and derivative instruments.

Skills

• Desirable (but not essential), some Asset Management portfolio compliance monitoring experience using BlackRock Aladdin, or alternatively Charles River, Latent Zero Sentinel, Thinkfolo or Mig21

Personal Attributes

• Ability to work and communicate effectively with investment management staff, including portfolio managers.
• Comfortable dealing with ambiguity
• Ability to learn new systems and concepts in a timely manner.
• Excellent attention to detail and proactive can do attitude
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Enthusiastic and positive approach, taking pride in output
• Team player who is creative and solution driven.

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.

Find out more about #LifeAtPhoenix

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

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