Independent Director

The member promise

The company administers retirement-benefit records and workflows for institutional arrangements and individual members. Its responsibilities may include onboarding, contribution allocation, account maintenance, beneficiary and nomination records, switches or instructions, benefit processing, reconciliation, communications and coordination with regulated financial counterparties.

The Board is seeking a General Management-oriented Independent Director who can make the operating model worthy of long-duration trust. A member may interact with the company only occasionally, yet an inaccurate record, missed contribution, invalid instruction or delayed benefit can affect years of savings. Average service levels are therefore insufficient; the Board must understand high-consequence exceptions and vulnerable-member outcomes.

Enterprise Priorities

1. End-to-end member-account integrity. Reconcile enrolment, identity, contribution, units or balances, fees, instructions, corrections and benefit payments across employer, trustee, administrator and financial counterparties.
2. Unallocated and suspense-item resolution. Set ageing, ownership, investigation, communication and escalation standards. Unmatched money or data must not remain invisible because aggregate balances reconcile.
3. Instruction authenticity. Protect changes to bank, beneficiary, contact, contribution, withdrawal and transfer details through risk-based verification, anomaly detection, cooling controls and member notification.
4. Benefit and exit processing. Review completeness, eligibility, calculations, tax treatment, documentation, payment, rejected transactions and communication. Cases involving death, disability, hardship or dependency require sensitive and expedited pathways.
5. Member communication quality. Ensure statements, digital balances, projections, fees, delays, corrections and options are understandable and consistent. Communication must distinguish guaranteed facts, estimates and third-party dependencies.
6. Employer and institutional-client governance. Define file standards, funding cut-offs, error responsibility, correction, member support, service measures, data roles and transition. A large client must not be allowed to normalise poor source data.
7. Operational resilience. Test peak processing, cyberattack, payment failure, corrupt files, identity fraud, unavailable counterparties, call-centre disruption and key-person loss. Recovery priorities should reflect member consequence.
8. Technology and change discipline. Govern product configuration, calculation engines, batch processing, privileged access, release testing, data migration, audit logs and rollback. Material change should include member and reconciliation impact.
9. Third-party accountability. Oversee banks, custodians, technology providers, communication vendors, contact centres and specialist processors through diligence, service evidence, audit rights, incident notification and practical exit plans.
10. Complaint and remediation governance. Classify errors by member harm, identify affected populations, calculate redress consistently, pay interest or compensation where required and learn from cases beyond the original complainant.
11. Culture and leadership capacity. Align management incentives with accurate records, resolved exceptions, member outcomes, resilience and regulatory conduct. Protect escalation by operations, compliance, technology and customer teams.

Decisions the Director will influence

The Nominating Board will expect independent judgment on new administrative products, significant client contracts, platform replacement, migrations, outsourcing, acquisitions, changes to service locations, digital-only servicing, identity technology and remediation of systemic errors.

No large migration should proceed without source-data profiling, member reconciliation, parallel testing, exception capacity, communication, cutover controls, rollback and post-migration assurance. Commercial deadlines cannot be allowed to convert known data defects into member-account defects.

Member-outcomes view of performance

The Board should see accounts fully reconciled; contributions posted on time; suspense value and age; statement corrections; high-risk instruction exceptions; benefit-processing time by consequence; rejected payments; complaints and reversals; affected members in systemic incidents; privileged-access exceptions; platform availability; third-party breaches; client concentration; audit findings; and remediation completion.

The Director should sponsor periodic member-journey testing that follows real cases across organisations and systems. Assurance should verify calculations, bank changes, beneficiary processing, file corrections and redress, not simply test whether a ticket was closed.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring at least 25 years of senior leadership in pension, insurance, asset servicing, banking operations, payments, regulated outsourcing, consumer protection, technology operations or large service enterprises. Former CEOs, COOs, operations heads, member-service leaders, chief risk officers and experienced regulated-company directors may be suitable.

The candidate should have led complex operating models, material technology change and customer remediation. This is a General Management mandate: the Board seeks broad enterprise judgment, operational empathy and the ability to make long-term member trust part of competitive strategy.