Global Head of Business Continuity

Posted:
7/18/2024, 5:00:00 PM

Location(s):
Brussels-Capital, Belgium ⋅ Brussels, Brussels-Capital, Belgium

Experience Level(s):
Expert or higher ⋅ Senior

Field(s):
Business & Strategy

About the Role

Job Description Summary
Do you want to be elevating Swift’s best-in-class business continuity framework to even higher levels?
Do you want to deliver value to the business, through ensuring our foundations, services and operations are reliable and efficient? Are you a strong leader with a passion for operational excellence, security and resilience?
Swift progresses on making international transactions faster, smarter and better, in a constantly changing world and a competitive marketplace. Innovations in the cross border payments landscape are introduced, new technology enables new opportunity. At the same time, the industry navigates through uncertainty and change. Swift keeps relentless focus and strong track records on the reliability and resiliency of our services and platform, while technology infrastructure and capabilities undergo transformation. By leveraging new technologies, standardisation, and automation, we aim to create a sustainable and scalable platform that will not only maintain the security, resilience, and stability of the Swift network but also provide enhanced value to our customers.
We are seeking a passionate leader, to globally manage business continuity for Swift, across our ecosystem in a mission-critical environment. In this function, you will join the Technology Platform leadership group and contribute to maintaining our strong foundations in an ever-changing landscape, with rapidly changing market and technology dynamics.

The main objective of this function will be to lead the following for Swift: 

  • Development of Business Continuity Management (BCM) strategies - determine and guide the selection of possible business operating strategies for continuation of business while maintaining the organisation’s critical functions.  

  • Organise and manage the formulation of the business continuity (BC) function, as a key component of integrated risk management and overall corporate resilience.  

  • Maintain the BC process and controls in the changing business, technology and regulatory landscape. Maintain a ‘clean sheet’ in the relevant internal and external audits. 

  • Manage the BC team (5 experts), providing resilience strategies, recovery objectives, business continuity plans; and obtaining management support 

  • Business impact analysis, in strong collaboration with business/service owners identifying the impacts resulting from disruptions that can affect the organisation and techniques that can be used to quantify and qualify such impacts. As well as identifying time-critical functions, their recovery priorities and interdependencies so that recovery time objectives can be set. 

  • Emergency response and operations - develop and implement procedures for responding to and stabilising the situation following an incident, including establishing and managing an emergency operations facility to be used as a command centre during the emergency. 

  • Developing and implementing business continuity and crisis management plans - designing, developing and implementing plans that provide continuity within the recovery time and recovery point objectives, build on solid understanding of the financial industry and the global threat landscape. 

  • Awareness and training programs roll-out the relevant programs to create and maintain corporate-wide awareness and enhance the skills required to develop and implement the business continuity program/process and its supporting activities. 

  • Maintaining and exercising plans - pre-planning and coordinating plan exercises and evaluating and documenting plan exercise results. Verifying that the plan will prove effective by comparison with a suitable standard and reporting the results in a clear and concise manner. 

  • Coordination with a broad set of stakeholders both internally (eg. collaborating with service and business owners, corporate-wide resilience functions) and externally (eg. BC engagements with our client community, external agencies for establishing applicable procedures and policies in coordinating continuity and restoration activities with local/national agencies etc.)  

  • Risk evaluation and control – determine the events and external surroundings that can adversely affect the Swift and its resources (facilities, technologies, etc.), the damage such events can cause and the controls needed to prevent or minimise the effects of potential loss, operational or reputational impact. Provide cost-benefit analysis to justify investment in controls to mitigate risks. 

 

You will  

  • Be accountable for Business Continuity at Swift. 

  • Have people management responsibilities for the team reporting to you  

  • Role-model our corporate values and leadership behaviors  

 

What this role brings you  

  • A highly relevant role, with an opportunity to make the difference in a domain which is key to Swift’s strategic success 

  • A great team – with skilled and fun people, and very dedicated collaborative internal network  

  • Constant learning – with the changes in our ecosystem, it’s impossible to get bored. No such thing as a dull day. 

 

Qualifications 

You bring   

  • BC expertiseA proven BC track record in a global organization with a mission-critical nature, is a must. 

  • Strong vision and Leadership skills – You demonstrated strategizing, setting direction in terms of how to operate and run technology servicesYou have the ability to lead without authority in a complex environment. 

  • A Servant leadership style - You can empower teams, inspire and challengeYou can get things done in a global organization, through excellent interpersonal and communication skills, thoughtful stakeholder management. You are equipped to engage with engineers, senior audiences, diverse internal stakeholders. You create buy-in, listen to customer needs. Proven track record of engaging and managing stakeholders across a geographically dispersed organisation with effective communication and relationship management. 

  • Business savviness You bring deep understanding of the financial ecosystem, and applicable regulation. Ability to ensure compliance with applicable statutes or regulations. Afterall, we make the business successful. 

 

Experience 

At least 10 years of relevant experience.

              

              

What we offer

We put you in control of career

We give you a competitive package

We help you perform at your best

We help you make a difference

We give you the freedom to be yourself

              

We give you the freedom to be yourself. We are creating an environment of unique individuals – like you – with different perspectives on the financial industry and the world. An environment in which everyone’s voice counts and where you can reach your full potential regardless of age, background, culture, colour, disability, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation, or veteran/military status.