Senior Product Owner and Implementation Director – Enterprise Limit Management System (Senior Consultant)
Location: UAE
Contract: 1–2 Year Contract
Role Purpose
The Senior Product Owner and Implementation Director – Enterprise Limit Management System is accountable for the end-to-end conceptualization, design, build, and enterprise rollout of the Bank’s in-house Enterprise Limit Management System (ELMS), while providing program-level delivery leadership aligned to the Bank-wide Transformation Office practices.
This role combines deep product ownership for a complex, risk‑critical banking platform with senior transformation and program delivery accountability across business, risk, operations, and technology. The platform will serve as the strategic, centralized limit and exposure control system for the Bank, supporting corporate and institutional banking products across funded, non‑funded, contingent, treasury, trade finance, project finance, and structured finance portfolios.
The incumbent will lead the initiative from vision through implementation and stabilization, ensuring regulatory compliance, architectural soundness, operational resilience, and enterprise scalability, while managing scope, budget, governance, end to end delivery, vendors, and cross‑borders execution.
Key Accountabilities
1. Product Ownership & Strategic Platform Leadership
- Own and drive the product vision, target architecture, roadmap, and delivery strategy for the Enterprise Limit Management System.
- Lead the end‑to‑end design and implementation of centralized capabilities covering:
- Facility-, borrower-, obligor-, subgroup-, and group‑level limits
- Industry, sector, country, issuer, cross‑border, and group exposure aggregation
- Large exposure, concentration, and regulatory threshold monitoring
- Funded, non‑funded, committed, uncommitted, and contingent exposure logic
- Credit Conversion Factor (CCF) treatment for off‑balance‑sheet exposures
- Collateral linkage, allocation, earmarking, haircut application, substitution, and release
- Margin lending and issuer risk calculations
- Multicurrency limits, utilizations, and FX impact handling
- Parent‑child hierarchies, sub‑limits, linked and shared limits
- Pre‑deal and post‑deal validations
- Breach detection, temporary excess, overrides, approvals, and escalation workflows
- Define and govern complex business rules and credit workflows, including:
- Cross‑border and transfer risk logic
- Country-of-risk assignment methodologies
- FI transaction approval and country workflows
- FI sell‑down processing and exposure redistribution
- PSRE calculation logic (CCF add‑on and Monte Carlo simulation based)
- Project finance exposure treatment (sponsor, paymaster, ultimate paymaster, contractor structures)
- Basel II / Supervisory Framework‑aligned exposure aggregation and large exposure control
- Covenant monitoring and early warning indicators
- Credit amendments, renewals, reviews, special assets, recoveries, and post‑sanction administration
- Translate credit policies, regulatory requirements, and internal governance standards into implementable rules, workflows, calculations, and control mechanisms.
2. Program & Transformation Delivery Leadership
- Provide end‑to‑end program delivery leadership for the ELMS initiative in line with Transformation Office governance standards.
- Develop and maintain the Program Master Plan, defining:
- Initiatives, milestones, dependencies, critical paths, and contingency actions
- Resource allocation across business, technology, risk, and operations
- Budget tracking and financial governance in partnership with Finance
- Lead delivery across all phases: design, build, integration, testing, rollout, and stabilization.
- Own and execute program governance, including:
- Steering Committees, project forums, and working groups
- Agenda setting, documentation, decision tracking, actions, and progress reporting
- Manage cross‑border execution across all countries where the solution is deployed.
- Ensure front‑to‑back transformation, coordinating Front, Middle, and Back Office participation to achieve true enterprise integration.
- Provide disciplined risk, issue, dependency, and change management, ensuring transparency and timely escalation.
3. Technology, Architecture & Integration Leadership
- Loan Origination and Credit Workflow systems
- Trade Finance and Treasury systems
- Collateral Management platforms
- Customer Master and exposure source systems
- Ensure strong understanding of how:
- Limits, utilizations, balances, contingent exposures, provisions, and recoveries
are sourced, reconciled, aggregated, and controlled across upstream systems.
- Engage closely with Architecture and Engineering teams on:
- APIs, integration patterns, and workflow orchestration
- Rules engines, data models, and calculation engines
- Real‑time or near‑real‑time processing and auditability
- Ensure the platform is scalable, configurable, secure, auditable, and enterprise‑grade.
4. Stakeholder & Vendor Management
- Has excellent presentation, senior stakeholders management track record and communication skills
- Act as the single senior interface across Business, Risk, Credit, Operations, Technology, Architecture, Finance, and external vendors.
- Manage vendor delivery, ensuring technical compliance, quality, timelines, and value realization.
- Partner with business leaders to shape solutions aligned to strategic objectives and reference architectures.
- Provide leadership in Agile and Hybrid delivery methodologies while ensuring delivery rigor.
5. Testing, Controls & Post‑Implementation Stability
- Define and oversee testing strategies, including:
- Complex exposure and aggregation scenarios
- Collateral allocation logic
- Workflow exceptions and regulatory edge cases
- End‑to‑end integration testing and UAT
- Full compliance with Change, Release, Incident, and Security management processes
- Production stability and controlled post‑go‑live stabilization
6. Innovation & Advanced Analytics (Added Advantage)
- Leverage AI / ML techniques for:
- Limit utilization forecasting
- Exposure analytics and stress signals
- Anomaly detection and intelligent risk monitoring
Requirements
- 20+ years of experience in banking product management, credit systems, lending platforms, risk systems, or large‑scale banking technology delivery.
- Proven experience designing, implementing, or transforming enterprise limit management systems in GCC and global banking environments.
- Strong exposure to UAE / GCC banking, regulatory expectations, and corporate and institutional credit practices.
- Hands‑on experience across:
- Corporate lending, FI, trade finance, project finance, structured finance
- Margin lending, bill discounting, LC, LG, contingent products
- Collateralized and structured lending
Core Competencies
- Deep credit, lending, collateral, and risk domain expertise
- End to End Delivery and implementation expertise in large complex programs
- Senior product ownership and strategic thinking
- Strong program and transformation delivery leadership
- Ability to bridge business, risk, and engineering effectively
- Excellent stakeholder, governance, and executive communication skills
- Strong analytical, documentation, presentation and problem‑solving capabilities
- Vendor negotiation and cross‑border team leadership
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Banking, Technology, Engineering, or Computer Science
- Master’s degree preferred
- CSPO or equivalent product certifications preferred
- Additional certifications in banking, risk, product, or enterprise technology delivery are an advantage