Director, Investment Data Operations

Director, Investment Data Operations

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We are a purpose-driven, dynamic and sustainable pension plan. An industry leading global investor with teams in Toronto to London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and other major cities across North America and Europe. We embody the values of our 600,000+ members, placing their best interests at the heart of everything we do.

Join us to accelerate your growth & development, prioritize wellness, build connections, and support the communities where we live and work. Don't just work anywhere — come build tomorrow together with us.

The Director, Investment Data Operations primary focus within Capital Markets Finance is to ensure that all data management processes and controls are effective, efficient and completed to ensure that timely and accurate data is available within OMERS investments platform and ready to be used by business consumers. The role requires strong leadership skills, combined with expertise in investment products, data quality tools, data governance and stewardship. The successful candidate will also be responsible for leading data initiatives to support new business requirements, data enhancements and solutioning for internal partners and stakeholders. The Director will work closely with members of Finance Data and the Capital Markets business to deliver a 'best-in-class' data service and will play an important role in driving our data strategy.

We believe that time together in the office is important for OMERS and Oxford, the strength of our employees, and the work we do for our pension members. Our hybrid work guideline requires teams to come to the office a minimum of 4 days per week.

Responsibilities

• Ensure the quality of data records across investment systems serving data users including trading, portfolio management, reporting, operations and analytics teams. Perform business and data analysis in order to resolve issues timely and lead resolution across business areas.
• Responsible for overseeing, maintaining and ensuring effective data control processes are followed by the team. Ensure that audit requirements are met at all times.
• Demonstrate a strong understanding of the end-to-end data lifecycle, from data sourcing, data entry, data lineage and integration across systems, through to reporting.
• Demonstrate a strong proficiency with applications being utilized for the investment business.
• Manage vendor relationships, ensure the timeliness and completeness of daily data feeds from multiple internal/external sources, onboard new feeds, review and negotiate vendor contracts and fees, and manage KPIs.
• Responsible for identifying and driving change initiatives to streamline and optimize processes, improve systems utilization, develop new data requirements and solutions for business partners and stakeholders, and play a lead role in project and transformation initiatives. Fosters an environment which supports continuous improvement.
• Manage the team's responsibilities with data conversions and investment system upgrades, ensuring testing is completed accordingly and implementation targets are met.
• Ensures documentation of operational processes, workflows, business process modelling and metadata cataloguing is robust and up-to-date.
• Provide leadership and ongoing direction to team members to optimize team's performance, conduct, teamwork and engagement. Provide supervision and technical guidance to the team members. Participate in recruiting and responsible for staff training and development and assessing performance effectiveness.
• Advance the team's data management capabilities, and establish and sustain a mature data management discipline aligned to data governance principles.
• Maintain up-to-date knowledge of OMERS policies regarding public and private investments and valuation, third-party agreements, and lead change initiatives as required to ensure daily compliance.
• Develop effective relationships with internal stakeholders in portfolio management, risk, operations, platforms, reporting, and OMERS enterprise teams, and externally with investment data vendors and others in the industry.

Qualifications

• University degree in Mathematics, Commerce & Finance or equivalent experience. Working towards a professional designation including CFA, MFin or CPA would be an asset.
• 8-10+ years of investment data operations experience in progressive roles, with strong working knowledge of public, private and derivative market instruments.
• Minimum 5 years of supervisory / management experience.
• Expertise in data management principles and practices for investment data (security reference, pricing, analytics, etc.) across asset classes. Experience using Master Data Management and data lifecycle tooling (eg. Informatica, Alteryx) is an asset.
• Knowledgeable in data governance principles and investment data domains.
• Detail oriented and demonstrates a strong aptitude for quantitative and qualitative analysis and problem solving.
• Proven ability to lead effective teams and drive change initiatives.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills are essential to deal with all levels within the organization and external contacts. Ability to build strong relationships with both internal and external stakeholders.

• Experience with or willingness to learn ODBC report writers such as Crystal, Access. Experience with SQL queries is an asset.
• Working knowledge of MS Office including Excel spreadsheets with real-time links and macros and Access databases.
• Experience with Azure DevOps an asset.

As one of Canada's largest defined benefit pension plans, our people-first culture is at its best when our workforce reflects the communities where we live and work — and the members we proudly serve. From hire to retire, we are an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive, barrier-free recruitment and selection process that extends all the way through your employee experience. This sense of belonging and connection is cultivated up, down and across our global organization thanks to our vast network of Employee Resource Groups with executive leader sponsorship, our Purpose@Work committee and employee recognition programs.