AVP Affinity Technology

at  Manulife

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JOB DESCRIPTION

Join our Individual Insurance Technology Leadership Team!
Affinity Markets serves 3 million customers through advisors, brokers, sponsors, agents, and direct online. We offer a wide breadth of protection products, including life, living benefits, mortgage creditor, health, dental, and travel insurance. In 2023, we onboarded the largest sponsor group in Company history; we now have the opportunity to reimagine and transform how we enable our customers to interact with us providing strong digital experience and stable technology solutions.
Technology is a critical enabler to get us from where we are today, to where we’re going, which involves driving the art of the possible in technology solution delivery. This role reports to the VP, Head of Individual Insurance Technology and will be a member of the Affinity Markets Leadership team. The successful candidate will own the roadmap and day-to-day delivery for digital technology solutions and administration systems that enable our Affinity business. The incumbent will lead a high caliber team of technology professionals and be a champion of technology driving organizational change which is critical to the successful delivery of the overall Affinity Technology strategy. The role will provide direction, oversight & program leadership to the technology teams ensuring timely and efficient deployment of applications, mitigating technical debt, and ensuring systems are safe, sound, and secure. This leadership role is an incredible opportunity to have a significant, strategic impact on our organization, our distribution partners, and our customers.
This role partners closely with the Head of Affinity Operations and the Head of Affinity Product & Platforms to provide digital technology solutions that enable our customers and partners to interact with us 24/7. The role will also serve as a connecting point to Global and Canadian Segment Shared Service Technology teams.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES:

• Partner with Product Ownership to develop technology roadmaps that deliver on business strategies and market requirements.
• Represent and lead the architecture, development, testing, implementation, and delivery of large-scale technology solutions with adherence to Global Strategy standards and accountable for Key Performance & Key Risk Indicators as well as Outcomes and Results.
• With input from business leaders and Value Stream Partners, lead the prioritization of work efforts within, and across, Value Streams while ensuring technical priorities are given equal focus keeping systems safe, sound, and secure
• Deliver on Technology specific financial and Strategic Cost Management (SCM) targets
• Recruit, retain and empower an impactful technology team that is highly engaged, proactive and business outcome focused.
• Model our Manulife values to drive the ongoing change required to evolve Canadian Technology organization; develop and drive a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
• Manage talent across the team for development and succession and rotate expertise throughout the team.
• Manage key vendor relationships and contracts.
• Achieve and sustain employee engagement scores.

JOB REQUIREMENTS:

• Minimum of 7-10 years of progressive leadership experience in technology strategy execution for large scale organizations; experience in the Insurance industry preferred
• Demonstrated success in leading transformational changes within an engineering culture; an ability to navigate a complex, highly regulated, marketing focused, growth business.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and implement a technology strategy and tactics to drive business goals, in collaboration with external and internal partners.
• Strong financial and business insight with demonstrated ability to manage large technology budgets.
• Demonstrated success at senior cross-functional project delivery involving multiple technical teams, partners, and business functions, including Risk.
• Strong Portfolio Management Skills, including the ability to manage multiple complex projects at the same time and under tight deadlines, operating in a cross-functional environment.
• Exposure and experience in such areas as agile, digital, emerging technologies, and Legacy (e.g., mainframe systems).
• Exceptional communication skills with a talent for engaging both technical and non-technical collaborators.
• Strong vendor management experience and skills with demonstrated success establishing long-term cost-effective partnerships. Experience in incident management is advantageous.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, management of information systems or equivalent experience; bilingualism is beneficial.

Please refer the Job description for details