About the role

Business SME, Insurance Investment Accounting - A senior business lead who knows insurance investment accounting from the inside, and can turn that knowledge into clear requirements, acceptance criteria and decisions for a large technology team modernizing a portfolio accounting platform.

Modernization of a long-established investment accounting platform used by insurance companies. The work moves a desktop application to a modern web platform in the cloud and migrates dozens of insurance clients, with their accounting data, onto it. The accounting engine stays in place. The users, screens, workflows, reports and data around it all change.

The candidate will be the business voice inside the delivery team. Engineers in the US and India will rely on you to explain what insurance accountants actually do, why each control exists, and what "correct" looks like before anything reaches a client. You will work alongside the client's accounting, product and operations leaders, and represent their clients' interests in every design and acceptance decision.

What you'll do

1. Lead workshops with accounting users, operations teams and product owners to capture how workflows run today and what must not change
2. Turn accounting processes into user stories, business rules and acceptance criteria that engineers can build and test against
3. Decide, with the client, which screens and reports to keep, redesign, consolidate or retire
4. Review designs for data-entry productivity, controls and makerchecker steps
5. Define the test scenarios and expected results that prove accounting outcomes are unchanged
6. Investigate reconciliation breaks between legacy and modernized results, and explain them in accounting terms
7. Assess each insurance client's configuration and reporting needs

Domain knowledge we need

1. Insurance investment accounting across statutory (NAIC SAP), US GAAP, IFRS and tax bases
2. Fixed income and lot-level accounting: amortization and accretion, effective yield, impairment and credit losses
3. Asset classes common to insurers: public and private placement bonds, commercial mortgage loans, structured securities, equities and alternatives
4. Regulatory and financial reporting: NAIC Annual Statement schedules, general ledger posting and month-, quarter- and year-end close
5. Investment operations: trade capture, cash and position reconciliation, pricing and valuation feeds

Qualifications

1. Hands-on use of an insurance investment accounting platform, such as State Street PAM, Clearwater, SimCorp or FIS Investment Accounting Manager
2. Product management or product owner experience on a financial software platform
3. Project management experience on a system implementation, upgrade or conversion
4. Proven work on a platform migration or conversion where accounting results had to be reconciled between old and new systems
5. Able to explain accounting concepts plainly to engineers, and technical constraints plainly to accountants
6. Comfortable working with a distributed team across US and India time zones