Head of Operational Compliance

Howden Ireland is seeking a Head of Operational Compliance to lead the development and oversight of risk and control frameworks, third-party and outsourcing governance, business continuity planning, and digital operational resilience.

The successful candidate will play a critical leadership role in ensuring Howden Ireland maintains a robust and effective first-line compliance, operational risk, business continuity and resilience framework.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the first line delivery of compliance, conduct, operational risk, business continuity and digital resilience frameworks.
• Translate regulatory requirements, including DORA and Operational Resilience, into practical business processes.
• Ensure governance, control effectiveness and insight drive proactive risk management and customer outcomes.
• Maintain a structured control environment with defined accountability and escalation.
• Work with the 2nd line of defense to ensure all risk and control decisions are evidenced and aligned to regulatory expectations.
• Identify root causes from MI, incidents, complaints and audit outputs.
• Lead first line embedment of DORA across the business.
• Ensure mapping of important business services and critical dependencies.
• Oversee ICT risk controls, incident management and recovery capability.
• Oversee resilience testing and drive remediation.
• Manage third-party ICT risk and critical supplier oversight.
• Own the Business Continuity framework and ensure it is embedded across all areas.
• Ensure plans support recovery within defined impact tolerances.
• Define recovery objectives and responsibilities across functions.
• Oversee testing of continuity plans and track remediation actions.
• Ensure alignment with DORA and operational resilience requirements.
• Maintain resilience frameworks linked to important business services.
• Embed resilience into governance and decision making.
• Coordinate testing and ensure outcomes drive control improvements.
• Act as the business owner for all assigned outsourced service providers, ensuring arrangements remain appropriate, effective and aligned to business needs.
• Monitor service provider performance against agreed SLAs/KPIs, with documented evidence of review and challenge.
• Ensure issues, incidents, or service failures are promptly identified, escalated and remediated.
• Maintain accurate and complete records for all outsourcing arrangements, including inputs to the central outsourcing register.
• Work with relevant stakeholders to ensure all outsourcing arrangements comply with applicable regulatory requirements.
• Develop MI showing risk exposure and control effectiveness.
• Shift reporting to forward-looking indicators.
• Support decision making in the Risk and Compliance Forum.
• Work with the 2nd line of defense to translate regulatory developments into operational requirements.
• Embed changes through processes, training and controls.
• Act as interface with second line on regulatory delivery.
• Lead due diligence across suppliers and partners.
• Ensure risk-based third-party assessment and ongoing third-party management.
• Oversee ICT third-party risk aligned to DORA.

About You:

• Strong understanding of operational risk, compliance, outsourcing resilience and continuity.
• Ability to lead governance and influence senior stakeholders.
• Strong judgement and analytical capability.
• Effective stakeholder management and communication.
• Experience in the broker or insurance industry.
• Experience embedding regulatory frameworks into operations.
• Experience with DORA, operational resilience, outsourcing and business continuity.
• Experience with MI, audit and assurance processes.
• Compliance qualification desirable.
• Insurance qualifications desirable.

What do we offer in return?

• A career that you define.
• We're committed to providing reasonable accommodations at Howden to ensure that our positions align well with your needs.