Senior Governance Manager Irish Life

Role Overview

Governance and Stakeholder Management is an established team within Insurance and Financial Solutions (IFS). The team champions a culture of strong governance and delivers robust, practical oversight of outsourcing, operational resilience, and business continuity across IFS’s outsourcing and services universe.

We have an exciting opportunity to join IFS as the Senior Governance Manager where you will help drive the next phase of our journey. One year into the new operating model, this role is now focused on strengthening and simplifying our frameworks, deepening our insight into risk and performance, and embedding governance disciplines across IFS and key outsourcing arrangements
This is a first-line role spanning both ILA and ILH (IFS’s regulated insurance entities), reporting directly into the Head of Governance and Stakeholder Management. You will lead and execute key elements of the governance framework to oversee the risks inherent in our model, whilst supporting high performance and delivering value to our stakeholders.

Key responsibilities include:

Strategic governance and stakeholder engagement
• Build and maintain collaborative relationships with key stakeholders across IFS, ILA, ILH and key service providers, to deliver IFS’s vision and strategy. 
• Act as a trusted adviser on outsourcing, operational resilience, and business continuity matters, helping stakeholders balance commercial priorities and risk.
• Influence decision-making by providing clear, concise insight on governance, risk trends and service performance.

Outsourcing, operational resilience and business continuity oversight
• Take end to end ownership of the Outsourcing agenda for IFS, acting as the senior focal point for Critical Arrangements and ensuring a clear line of sight from Executive Committees through effectiveness reviews to Board reporting.
• Lead, energise and continuously enhance IFS’s governance frameworks for Outsourcing, Operational Resilience and Business Continuity across the services universe, ensuring they are not only compliant with regulatory expectations and internal standards but are demonstrably effective and appropriate in practice.
• Actively drive the embedding of these frameworks into business teams, providing robust challenge, practical guidance and hands on support on implementation, control design and documentation, and intervening where arrangements are not meeting required outcomes.
• Lead the identification, assessment and monitoring of outsourcing, operational resilience and business continuity risks, ensuring appropriate, timely escalation and driving remediation and improvement actions to conclusion.

Additional Responsibilities

Reporting, insight and continuous improvement
• Produce high-quality governance reporting for key stakeholders, including entity CEOs, Boards and governance committees, clearly evaluating the effectiveness and appropriateness of governance arrangements and supporting them in fulfilling their mandates.
• Monitor key performance indicators, service levels and key risk indicators, ensuring appropriate measures and monitoring are in place, and using these to assess the effectiveness and appropriateness of governance arrangements, highlighting emerging risks, trends and areas of concern.
• Partner with other teams and divisions to:
o Leverage and build on existing reporting and governance structures and control environments
o Promote simplification, standardisation, and streamlining of governance processes to achieve synergies and efficiencies.
• Track and report on remediation activities, assessing the impact and effectiveness of corrective actions. 

Committee and regulatory support
• Work closely with committee members and key stakeholders within IFS and across the outsourcing universe to shape and coordinate inputs, optimise committee packs, and ensure that information is timely, robust and decision-ready, effectively supporting sound decision-making and regulatory oversight.
• Contribute to periodic and annual review cycles, including Operational Resilience and Business Continuity risk assessments, scenario testing and impact analysis.
• Stay abreast of regulatory developments and financial services governance best practice, recommending and implementing updates to frameworks, policies and processes as required.

Leadership and ways of working
• Role-model a risk-aware, customer-focused culture and promote effective governance behaviours across IFS and the outsourcing and services universe.
• Work proactively with key stakeholders to understand their needs and ensure they are met through efficient, effective and proportionate governance arrangements.
•Take responsibility for driving efficiency and effectiveness by identifying, leveraging and embedding AI and wider technology solutions, and by standardising, streamlining and simplifying processes, reporting and ways of working across IFS where appropriate

Experience and skills

• Proven experience in a manager-level role within governance, risk, compliance or a related discipline in financial services.
• Strong knowledge of governance requirements for outsourcing, operational resilience and business continuity (including regulatory expectations and industry practice).
• Excellent relationship management and interpersonal skills, with the confidence to influence senior stakeholders. The successful candidate will have proven success building relationships and working collaboratively with a broad range of stakeholders, preferable in a governance context. 
• Pragmatic, commercially minded, and delivery-focused, with high levels of responsibility, ownership and attention to detail.
• A strong ability to assess facts objectively, analyse data, and solve problems to achieve successful outcomes.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to clearly convey information, listen actively, and tailor communications to different audiences, including senior management and Boards.