Strategy Lead

Manulife is a leading international financial services group that helps people make their decisions easier and lives better. With our global headquarters in Toronto, Canada, we operate as Manulife across our offices in Canada, Asia, and the United States. We provide financial advice, insurance, and wealth and asset management solutions for individuals, groups, and institutions.

**The opportunity**

The Strategy Lead is an integral contributor to development, governance and realization of Manulife’s Strategy in Singapore. The role partners cross functionally and with local and regional teams to assist with strategy development, linking strategic goals/priorities to initiatives with defined outcomes/benefits to deliver transformation. In doing so, the role enables and supports the business to build realistic plans of attack that align investment to resource commitment, measures of success and benefits.

**Responsibilities**:
**Strategy development, strategic planning and deliverables**
- Support the implementation of the Strategic Planning process in Singapore, including assisting development of functional strategies, as well as co-ordinating the development of Plan documents with various Local and Regional stakeholders.
- Support the development of strategic deliverables / reports (including annual strategic plan, strategy presentations, GM Scorecards, Board Papers, Rating Agency papers, CEO Comms, Townhall papers, business reviews, memos and any other ad-hoc requests), for at local and regional level various strategic forums.
- Supporting the Head of Strategy and wider leadership team to assist, as required, with the development and monitoring of key strategic initiatives, enabling the delivery of business strategic objectives
- Lead / support the creation of new strategic projects including, framing and sizing of opportunities, evaluation of options for decisioning, establish delivery dependencies and KPIs, working closely with leaders across the organization.
- Build best in class reporting and analytics; provide proactive recommendations to drive enhancements across reporting and analytics

**Industry and competitor analysis**
- Work with multiple local and regional stakeholders to research and compile relevant market and competitive intelligence profiles, including building actionable insights, as well as staying abreast of relevant external developments.

**What we are looking for**:

- Bachelor’s degree with at 5-8 years’ relevant experience in financial services (life insurance industry preferred).
- Previous strategy, actuarial, finance or corporate development experience working for a multinational company, accounting firm, investment bank, private equity or strategy consulting firm.
- Knowledge of enterprise PMO, PMO governance, and/or investment planning.
- Strong PowerPoint skills: ability to manoeuvre complex information and distil into key meaningful insights and high impact slides to tell a story
- Strong financial modelling skills/data analysis: ability to build complex financial models and translate financial information and actuarial/accounting data into useful and applicable information.
- Project management: experience executing projects by developing deliverables timelines and effectively managing stakeholders.
- Stakeholder management: effectively manage senior members of the Asia Strategy team/local BUs and other functions (such as Controllers, Tax, Actuarial, Legal, IT and Wealth Management) to provide the deliverables needed to drive projects to completion.
- Communication: excellent speaking and writing skills are required to convey key messages in a succinct manner.
- PowerPoint, Word and Excel: expert skills on PowerPoint with the ability to tell a story and sell a message. Can analyse large quantities of data, generate charts in Excel. Should have the ability to translate what the data is saying into applicable and useful information.

**Challenges**:

- Analytics: outstanding analytical skills are required to bring together large volumes of information and highlight the key themes and make recommendations for a senior executive audience.
- Financials: an understanding of insurance financial fundamentals and commercial drivers behind project business cases. Initiative, drive and sense of urgency has the initiative and drive to take ownership of tasks.
- Change management/ambiguity: ability to work in a fast-paced environment with incomplete information and ability to continue to push projects based on known information, common sense and asking the right questions.
- Detail oriented: important to pay extra attention to detail to ensure the highest quality of work is submitted to senior management for their review.
- Perseverance, team player and hard work ethic: seeing things to completion despite obstacles is a key requirement.
- Research, analysis and problem-solving strong problem-solving abilities by identifying issues, taking a logical approach to finding an answer based on