Investment & Risk Application Support Specialist at Old Mutual South Africa

• The Investment and Risk Application Specialist is responsible for taking functional and business support ownership of the integrated quantitative modeling, risk, and trade order management application and acting as the subject matter expert to business process owners and application users.
• The ideal candidate is a professional, who is comfortable in a business support environment, as well as to work with the internal and external quantitative and application development teams and occasionally debug code. The candidate can quickly understand, interpret, and resolve both business and technical requests. Previous experience in an application support role is a requirement, with proven time spent delivering functional and technical application support.
• In this role, you will be required to interact with and provide specialized IT services, technology product management, and Information Security services to high-performing Investment and Risk functions. Your duties will include collaboration with colleagues across the business’ various front office, quantitative, risk and technology teams to achieve joint success and ensuring we deliver the best possible solution and service to all stakeholders.

Responsibilities And Key Result Areas

• This role will work closely with other technology, quantitative and risk teams as well as traders, portfolio managers, and stakeholders, to provide application support under the supervision of the technical lead. You will be required to gain a deep understanding of the vendor applications as well as support in-house applications used by our teams.

Specifically, you will be responsible for:

Business support

• Learn the businesses and the investment, hedging and trading requirements to provide business support to all stakeholders
• Work directly with portfolio managers, traders, financial engineers, and risk analysts in supporting various ALM hedging and other investment strategies
• Provide front end support to front and middle office users and colleagues in other areas of the business and wider Old Mutual Group
• Provide support for Fixed Income, structured finance, FX, and other asset classes
• Administer and support trading platform functionality, setup new users, maintain user permissions and, regulatory rules and other financial risk limit configurations
• Onboard new and maintain existing brokers, trading counterparties, and trading activity in new global markets

Change Management

• Co-ordinate the analysis and testing of workflow and integration for new instruments and products with internal and external stakeholders
• Keeping a record of configuration changes and scheduling application updates.
• Management and coordination of regression, system, component, and User acceptance testing and, release and change management processes across environments to ensure continued and synchronized functionality.
• Performing analyses on the investment and risk application functionality and suggesting improvements.
• Consulting with the vendor development team, internal and external stakeholders to improve application performance.

Incident management

The role includes business support escalation in accordance to agreed service level agreements, including incident, change, problem management and incident analysis reporting:

• Ensure that client requests and incidents are handled correctly
• Identify root cause of issues and isolate the area where a defect exists. Provide guidance to development team to resolve the issue.
• Collaborate with other teams in technology on issue resolution and projects
• Establishing the root causes of application errors and escalate serious concerns to your TL.
• Maintain documentation on new issues, work arounds, and support processes

Integration and continuous improvement

• Identify integration opportunities and participate in integration projects that is designed to deliver solutions that provide a unified business experience
• Work with stakeholders to identify opportunities for continuous improvements to processes, products.

General

• Develop industry, product and expertise through training, events, internal resources, and self-study (personal investment in lifelong learning)
• Able to support different time zones. This may mean an earlier start or an occasional meeting outside normal working hours. Flexible working hours.
• The role may evolve and require you to manage staff

Requirements: Skills, Qualifications and Experience required

• B.Sc. Computer Science or B.Sc.(Hons) majoring in a quantitative field such as Risk Management, Mathematics, Computational Finance, Statistics or a related discipline.
• 4 -6 years’ experience with a Financial Institution in application support role.
• Programming skills would be advantageous.
• Practical experience with ITIL processes e.g., problem management, incident management, change control, etc.
• Experience with Investments systems, Investments Risk analysis systems and technologies.
• Experience working in a multi-disciplined Agile and DevOps environment.
• Experience with application systems including Windows, local client, VM, etc.
• Experience with cloud hosted solutions
• Familiar with programming and scripting languages e.g., C++, python, SQL
• Familiar with data warehouses and data lakes.
• Integration and automation techniques
• Configuration Management