The Head of Risk will be responsible for Guardrisk Group short and long-term insurance licenses under its management control and exposure to international insurance licenses in the Group. This individual will be responsible for identifying, assessing, managing, monitoring and reporting of risk as well as the management of the enterprise risk management framework. Key stakeholders include actuarial, finance and all of the business functional areas.  

Requirements

• Honours Degree (specialising in finance, audit and risk management)
• Relevant membership Qualification 
• Registration with the Institute of Risk Management South Africa (preferable)
• Knowledge of any of the well-known ERM frameworks (i.e. COSO, King) and Prudential standards
• Solid understanding of Solvency Assessment & Management (SAM)
• At least 8-10 years’ experience risk management experience in the financial short-term insurance and long-term insurance

Duties & Responsibilities

• Drafting and preparing strategic risk appetite and risk management tools to scope direction for business
• Ensure the enterprise risk management framework is effectively implemented within the business.
• Develop and maintain risk management documentation such as the risk appetite statement, risk taxonomy, risk policies etc.
• Facilitate reviews of the risk appetite statement to ensure it remains appropriate and recommend changes where this may be required.
• Develop and monitoring of appropriate key risk indicators together with associated tolerances limits and related reporting.
• Undertake periodic risk assessments working with the various risk owners and ensure that the risk registers are kept up to date.
• Manage the own risk and solvency assessment (ORSA) process including coordinating all related inputs, outputs and assessments.
• Provide risk management guidance and training to staff and ensure the necessary documents are made available.
• Critical review of existing and/or development of new risk reports to ensure that they are suitable and useful to aid in decision making.
• Preparation, submission and/or presentation of risk reports to the various stakeholders in forums such as Manco, Opsco, Exco, Audit and risk committee and other governance related forums within the business.
• Establishing and maintaining combined assurance model.
• Identifying current/actual and emerging risks through evaluating internal and external risk environment on a continuous basis
• Aggregating, monitoring and advising management on the effective management and mitigation of identified risks.
• Develop and monitoring on risk appetite, risk registers, loss data, combined assurance, key risk indicators and emerging risks.
• Keeping abreast with last industry and regulatory developments and assessing this against impact on current GR model and strategy.
• Give input into business scoping initiatives to identify any potential high risk items.
• Manage and approve the key risk acceptances process for Guardrisk
• Entrenching a healthy risk culture within Guardrisk
• Build and maintain relationships with internal clients and stakeholders across MMH
• Managing the rollout of group wide risk initiatives effectively within Guardrisk
• Contribute to sustaining a competitive edge through external networking and benchmarking and representation on related forums.
• Define fair and innovative client service practices which build rewarding relationships, and allows team to provide exceptional client service.
• Engage with key internal and external stakeholders to identify changing client needs and make recommendations to align service offering with client needs.
• Contribute to a client service excellence culture which builds enduring relationships and allows team to provide exceptional client service.
• Develop client service level agreements and standards in order to ensure clients receive clear and accurate information and are kept informed at all times
• Drive efforts to improve client service and fair treatment of clients within area of responsibility
• Incorporate client feedback into the enhancement of daily business processes and management operating systems
• Create a positive work climate and culture to energise employees, give meaning to work, minimise work disruption and maximise employee productivity.
• Demonstrate exemplary leadership behaviour, through personal involvement, commitment and dedication in support of organisational values.
• Select and recruit suitably qualified talent in line with Employment Equity principles and MMI values
• Drive a culture that guides and directs best practice, fostering an environment of continuous learning, improvement and cohesiveness.
• Enable a learning and growth culture whereby information regarding successes, issues, trends and ideas are actively shared between team members.
• Execute effective workforce planning practices to ensure that staffing requirements are accurately forecasted. Identify employee growth and development needs and schedule interventions to enable ongoing development, training and personal growth.
• Effectively manage performance within the team in order to ensure business objectives are achieved
• Control the budget for area, including the authorisation of expenditures and implementation of financial regulations.
• Manage high risk and problematic financial issues in area of accountability and contribute to the development of policy.
• Identify solutions to enhance cost effectiveness and increase operational efficiency.
• Implement and manage financial risk methodologies, techniques and systems and use to monitor and report on financial activities.

Competencies

• Business Acumen 
• Collaboration 
• Networking 
• Innovative 
• Client orientated