Head of First Line Risk (Operations)

Nucleus Financial; Salisbury, City of Edinburgh; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial services group in Salisbury seeks a Head of First Line Risk and Incident Management. This senior role focuses on risk management strategies and leading a team to minimize operational impact while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. The ideal candidate should possess significant experience in risk and incident management, strong analytical skills, and the ability to communicate effectively across various levels of the organization.

Benefits

Non-contributory pension

Bonus

Enhanced parental leave

Health and wellbeing initiatives

Flexible working options

Qualifications

• Significant experience in financial services with an understanding of functional interdependencies.
• Strong knowledge of risk management principles, frameworks, and best practices.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement risk governance across COO function.
• Oversee risk identification, management and resolution.
• Drive continuous improvement in risk management culture.

Skills

Risk management

Incident management

Analytical skills

Problem-solving

Stakeholder management

Communication skills

Leadership

Organizational skills

Job description

This role is responsible for managing First Line Risk across the Chief Operating Office (COO) function. The Head of First Line Risk and Incident Management will design, implement, and embed an effective risk management model and culture within the COO. Additionally, they will oversee the identification, management, and resolution of business incidents, ensuring coordinated response and remediation plans when risks materialise.

This senior role sets the strategic direction for First Line Risk, Incident Management, and Remediation across the Nucleus group. Leading a team of Risk Managers, Incident Managers, and Remediation Analysts, the role ensures a proactive approach to risk management within the COO function.

Key responsibilities include developing governance, reporting, and assurance processes to enhance risk visibility, escalation, and control. The role also leads business coordination during incidents, keeping senior stakeholders informed and ensuring effective response and resolution. A strong focus is placed on minimizing customer, reputational, financial, operational, and regulatory impact while ensuring timely remediation of any customer detriment within risk appetites.

You’ll spend your time :

First Line Risk

• Designing and implementing the First Line Risk operating and governance model across the COO function, working closely with senior leadership to integrate risk management strategies into day-to-day operations.
• Identifying and reporting on systemic issues through root cause analysis and risk assessment and working with risk and control owners to implement remediation plans and track and report on their effectiveness
• Overseeing the regular review of our first line risks, controls and key risk indicators to assess their ongoing adequacy and effectiveness
• Collaborating with process owners and relevant stakeholders to develop and implement enhancements to operational processes and controls
• Providing regular reporting to senior management highlighting trends, performance metrics, and management of high impact risks, events and issues
• Driving a culture of continuous improvement, fostering awareness and accountability for proactive identification, monitoring and management of risk across the COO Function
• Working closely with second line risk to support oversight and reporting and ensure alignment with our business risk framework
• Ensuring compliance with relevant regulatory requirements, industry standards, and internal policies

Incident Management and Remediation :

• To agree and drive the strategic direction of Incident Management and Loss Assessment activities for Nucleus
• Manage early identification of potential incidents, ensuring the team responds quickly when events occur
• Act as point of escalation for significant incidents for senior management
• Ensure a rigorous process for incident management is in place, with ownership and regular monitoring (from incident response through to post incident review and root cause analysis)
• Development and maintenance of management information reporting as necessary
• Providing communication through verbal and written updates to key stakeholders up to and including the Executive Risk and Compliance Committee
• Monitor incidents to ensure that all Service Level Agreements are respected.
• Drive good technical outcomes for loss assessment calculation, ensuring customer detriment is rectified within our risk appetites.
• Ownership of root cause analysis on all incidents, with clarification on details and gaps in risk and control framework linking to incident
• Clear action plans and identification of business ownership to support implementation of controls for future prevention.
• Analyse metrics and reports on the performance of the incident management process.
• Responsible for maintaining a view of industry incident management best practice and for sharing that as appropriate with leaders across the business
• Provide coaching and support to build team knowledge and skills
• Ensure good relationship management with internal and external stakeholders
• Continuously role model Nucleus’ values, and inspiring others to do the same
• Responsible for managing your own delegated workload, you will have the opportunity to prioritise your activity and make decisions to effectively manage events and issues to resolution.

A bit about you

A senior individual with a proven track record in risk management, incident and / or loss assessment. Professional, resilient and credible, you’ll use your industry knowledge to build a strong self-sufficient team. You love combining your analytical and problem-solving skills to identify potential issues, design the best course of action, and calmly manage the most significant and sensitive incidents through to conclusion. A structured thinker able to effectively articulate complex information in an understandable way with a variety of senior stakeholders, sharing clear recommendations when needed. Organised, self-motivated, you’ll enjoy working within a fast-paced environment that allows you to demonstrate your adaptability to deal with deadlines and unforeseen challenges, operating as a champion for our values throughout the wider business.

• Significant experience in financial services, with full understanding of interactions and interdependencies across all functional groups and stakeholders
• Strong knowledge of risk management principles, frameworks, and best practices.
• Familiarity with regulatory requirements, industry standards, and emerging trends in risk management.
• Experience in managing major incidents, with the ability to work under pressure and handle conflicting situations with a range of stakeholders at all levels of seniority
• A completer / finisher with demonstrable experience in driving through solutions and completing activity on allocated tasks / projects
• A strong people leader who has an ability to work under pressure, with sound analysis and problem-solving skills and able to build excellent working relationships
• Excellent documentation / communication and stakeholder management skills
• Knowledge of Operational processes and systems
• Excellent Collaboration and Facilitation Skills and building strong relationships
• Ability to work independently using your initiative
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Strong organisation skills and capacity to multi- task with an ability to prioritise conflicting priorities

A little about us

We are the Nucleus Financial Platforms group and we help make retirement more rewarding. Here at Nucleus, people come first - whether it’s our colleagues, or the advisers and customers we support, we know that working in partnership and collaboration leads to the best outcomes. Together, we’ve shaped the platform to how it is today. We work hard, and we celebrate hard too.

Our ambition is to create a platform with a difference, putting the customer centre stage meant tearing up the rule book and starting from scratch. We’ve come a long way since then, but our mission remains just as focused. That’s why our culture, values, and social responsibility are things we keep at the top of our agenda – because we know they matter and have a big impact.

Our culture is one of the many things that sets us apart from the pack. We want to have an environment where our people feel that they can make a real difference, know they’ll be rewarded for their efforts and more importantly, enjoy themselves at work.

Inclusion and diversity at Nucleus

As with most things in life, who cares, wins. We really care about inclusion.

For us it’s not a tick box exercise; inclusion and diversity are embedded in our culture and everything we do. It’s a commercial imperative. It isn’t about being PC. It’s about being future-relevant and durable. We owe it to ourselves and the industry to ensure we are playing our part in creating a fair, balanced and transparent financial services sector.

More diversity means broader experience, a wider set of perspectives and a better collective ability to problem-solve. And it means being more representative of customer groups, which supports areas such as product development.

At Nucleus, we offer a generous blend of benefits for the things that really matter to our people, including a non-contributory pension, bonus, enhanced parental leave, paid time off for emergencies, health and wellbeing initiatives and flexible working options.

If you’d like to find out more about us or the role, please get in touch with our team.