Senior Risk Officer

Job description

About the Role: To manage daily risk mitigation and monitoring for the firm’s credit, collateral, and operational risk portfolios, with a primary focus on margin lending and financing operations. Reporting to the Head of Compliance, this role ensures all trading accounts comply with local regulatory mandates while actively tracking internal process failures, validating manual system entries, enforcing dual controls, and logging operational risk incidents. Responsibilities: 1. Margin & Credit Control • Ensure no margin transaction occurs without validating mandatory initial and maintenance margin thresholds. • Assess client financial profiles using the internal credit scorecard to assign and review appropriate margin limits. • Monitor daily margin usage, block unauthorized limit extensions, and immediately escalate unauthorized breaches to senior management. • Verify that margin trading transactions are restricted from unapproved, highly speculative, or derivative financial instruments. 2. Collateral & Liquidation Management • Collateral Haircut Reviews: Evaluate eligible stocks to assign Initial Margin ratios and risk groups, ensuring high-risk or "red-colored" stocks are restricted. • Concentration Limit Monitoring: Track total credit exposure per stock across all client portfolios to prevent excessive single-stock concentration. • Recommend and direct forced liquidations for unsettled margin calls, prioritizing assets systematically from high-risk to higher-quality holdings. 3. Operational Risk & Process Controls • Establish processes to assess and mitigate risks associated with new products, services, distribution channels, or system enhancements. • Sample test and validate manual entries, correction entries, and account regularizations within core systems. • Coordinate with department heads to ensure procedures are updated regularly to include controls for new business processes. • Monitor, investigate, and update management on significant reportable events such as incident, complaints, claims, errors, rule breaches, and fraud. 4. Governance & Integrated Reporting • Prepare the annual risk assessment plan and recommend policy adjustments in light of the firm's changing risk appetite. • Provide continuous risk identification and mitigation support to business lines and department heads. • Produce timely, accurate, and meaningful risk exposure dashboards and reports for the Board and Group Risk. • Work closely with internal audit and compliance to perform integrated control reviews and track regulatory requirements.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in Law, Business Administration, Finance, or a related field.
• Mandatory Certifications: CMA qualifications such as: (CME-1A, CME-1B).
• Related Work Experience: 3–6 years of experience in credit risk or market risk within a CMA-licensed institution, with specific exposure to margin trading environments.

Skills