Vice President, Operations Excellence

About FWD Group

FWD Group (1828.HK) is a pan-Asian life and health insurance business that serves more than 38 million customers across 10 markets, including BRI Life in Indonesia. FWD’s customer-led and tech-enabled approach aims to deliver innovative propositions, easy-to-understand products and a simpler insurance experience. Established in 2013, the company operates in some of the fastest-growing insurance markets in the world with a vision of changing the way people feel about insurance. FWD Group is listed on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under the stock code 1828.

For more information, please visit www.fwd.com

PURPOSE

• Lead, manage and drive end‑to‑end operational performance across the insurance value chain including enterprise-wide process excellence, productivity improvement, cost optimisation, and service quality transformation, ensuring operations are scalable, customer‑centric, compliant, and digitally enabled.

• Collaborate and partner closely with Group and Market senior leadership and cross-functional teams to translate strategy into execution and measurable outcomes for customer and business value.

• Lead, manage, coach and develop a team of high-performing individuals who are viewed as operations management experts in Group and markets who can competently lead and execute with a digital-first mindset whilst encouraging and driving a culture of continuous learning and development through new ways of working and ideation of solutions leveraging new and emerging technologies.

KEY ACCOUNTAIBILITIES

Enterprise Operations Excellence Strategy:

• Own and Group-led Operations Excellence vision, strategy, operating model, roadmap and success measures aligned to business strategy, growth, regulatory requirements and market maturity difference.

• Establish enterprise-wide common standards for process design, governance, and performance management across markets and business lines.

• Translate global standards into market-relevant outcomes.

• Drive harmonisation and scale across regions and businesses.

• Drive a culture of continuous improvement and operational discipline.

Process Optimisation & Excellence:

• Operating model transformation (shared services, COEs, outsourcing)

• Lead business operations reviews and deep dives with markets across operations management and support functions.

• Lead large‑scale process simplification and re‑engineering across core insurance processes, including new business, underwriting, policy servicing, renewals, claims, complaints management, customer servicing and contact centres.

• Establish clear process ownership, standards, and controls across markets and functions.

• Remove fragmentation and handoffs across functions and markets, with a strong end‑to‑end ownership mindset.

• Simplify, standardise, and redesign processes to eliminate waste, reduce cycle time, and improve quality.

• Ensure processes are scalable, customer-centric, and compliant with regulatory requirements.

Productivity, Cost & Capacity Optimisation:

• Deliver sustainable productivity gains through Lean, Six Sigma, automation, and operating model redesign.

• Identify structural cost reduction opportunities while protecting customer experience and risk controls.

• Improve workforce planning, capacity management, and outsourcing/vendor performance where relevant.

Customer Experience & Service Quality:

• Embed customer-centric design principles into operational processes.

• Improve turnaround times (TAT), first‑time‑right rates, and service reliability.

• Partner with Customer Experience teams to translate insights, complaints, and NPS drivers into operational fixes.

Digital Enablement & Automation:

• Partner with Group Technology and Digital teams and Markets to prioritise and deliver measurable performance improvements with a focus on:

  • Workflow automation and straight‑through processing.

  • Document digitisation and decision automation.

  • AI and analytics use cases (where mature and appropriate).

• Ensure business readiness, adoption, and benefits realization from technology investments.

Risk & Controls:

• Ensure operational processes are compliant with group-wide regulatory, audit, and risk requirements.

• Ensure regulatory consistency while reducing market-by-market divergence.

• Strengthen controls, exception management, and issue remediation without adding unnecessary complexity.

• Serve as a key partner to Risk, Compliance, and Internal Audit.

Performance Management & Insights:

• Define and track enterprise operational KPIs (cost, quality, speed, resilience, customer impact).

• Establish transparent reporting and cadence for executive level governance.

• Use data and insights to proactively identify performance risks and improvement opportunities.

Leadership & Capability Building:

• Lead cultural change towards continuous improvement and operational excellence.

• Influence senior stakeholders across Group, markets, and functions.

• Drive adoption of new processes, ways of working, and performance disciplines.

• Align process transformation with customer experience, growth, expense management, and regulatory priorities.

• Build a strong continuous‑improvement culture within insurance operations.

• Support capability building through training, coaching, and best‑practice sharing.

• Influence and coach senior leaders to adopt best‑in‑class operational practices.

• Serve as a trusted advisor to ExCom on operational efficiency, and productivity improvement.

• Provide valued thought leadership and insight on how to seize market opportunity and be successful in solution delivery that fosters a common language, set of best practices and cross functional capabilities to deliver results.

• Foster a culture of learning, sharing, commitment, collaboration and continuous improvement and delivery of customer value.

QUALIFICATIONS / EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in business or related field.

• 15+ years of experience in insurance operations, transformation, or operational excellence roles.

• Proven track record leading large‑scale, multi‑year transformation initiatives.

• Strong understanding of the insurance value chain and regulatory environment.

• Deep expertise in Lean, Six Sigma, process re‑engineering, and change management.

• Executive‑level stakeholder management and influence skills.

• Experience working across multiple markets or complex organisational structures preferred.

• Proven experience in leading and developing high performing teams with a diverse background and culture.

• Proven experience in applying data and analytics to track performance, identifying problems, source solutions and pivoting strategy where and when needed.

• Experience working with digital, automation, analytics, and AI initiatives.

KNOWLEDGE & TECHNICAL SKILLS

• Broad and comprehensive knowledge of financial services, insurance operation, products and customer experience.

• Deep understanding of insurance value chains and economics.

• Strategic mindset with strong execution discipline.

• Systems thinker with enterprise mindset

• Strong commercial and customer‑centric mindset.

• Executive‑level stakeholder influencing and communication.

• Change leadership across complex, matrix organisations.

• Data-driven structured problem solving

• Deep customer and business outcome orientation.

• Strong ability to demonstrate how a solution can solve customer and business problems and create sustainable value.

• Extensive market awareness and knowledge of trends in operations management across Asia with built up external network.

• Proven experience in leading, influencing, motivating and guiding global, regional and market teams to formulate management strategies aligned to strategic outcomes and company vision and monitoring effectiveness.

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with and influence diverse groups of senior executives that have expertise in different domains and at times conflicting agendas.

• Demonstrated proficiency to work and adapt in a dynamic environment where strategies and priorities may need to shift and change.

• Exceptional analytical and critical thinking skills to identify and solve problems.

• Extensive knowledge of regional insurance regulations, standards and protocols.