National Manager: Trust Admin

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together one story at a time.
- With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

To provide strategic, operational, and people leadership in the management and administration of trusts across all national branches, ensuring compliance with fiduciary obligations, delivering superior client service, ensuring sound financial and risk oversight, and driving operational efficiency and service innovation.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities

Strategic and Operational Leadership
- Develop and execute the national Trust Administration strategy.
- Ensure alignment with the overall Trust Services and Beneficiary Fund business strategy. Keep abreast of knowledge and skills relevant to the fiduciary industry and support all branches with adoption and alignment.
- Ensure a streamlined and standardized approach to the way of working or processes across all Trust Services branches.
- Be the key point of contact for all support functions and coordinate all related activities or projects in liaison with 1LoD and 2LoD on behalf of Trust Services.
- Plan, execute and monitor progress on each support team’s annual strategies working closely with Trust Services MANCO.
- To be responsible for the Reputation Forum Meetings on behalf of Absa Trust (Wills, Estates, Trust and Beneficiary Fund), which includes planning, reporting and setting up of meetings. Furthermore, managing all risk issues and managing PI claims.
- Play an active and leading role in all trust systems development or enhancements projects in liaison with IT and other related clusters such as Change Management team and Value Optimization Forums or Committees.
- Manage all Associated Parties and Introducers contracts and performance evaluations in Trust Services.
- Manage and exercise oversight into outsourced services in line with the Trust Services strategy and report to MANCO monthly.

Trust Administration Management
- Oversee the end-to-end administration of trusts in accordance with legal, regulatory, and fiduciary requirements.
- Evaluate New To Bank (NTB) and Stock trusts for correctness, feasibility and potential risks (compliance, legal, reputational etc.).
- Ensure that all files have been correctly captured on the trust system by the trust officers and that all assets have been accounted for by doing frequent reviews and testing.
- Review each product frequently and identify nonviable trusts and exit relationships in collaboration with Regional Managers.
- Ensure that Annual Reviews are implemented across branches by performing monthly reviews or tests per trust officers, working closely with the trust administration management team.
- Actively participate in the annual reviews of trust fixed properties to ensure that transfer costs provisions are made, renovations, maintenance and general construction to mitigate the financial risk due to operational losses.
- Support the business in driving yearend financial statements finalization and distribution annually.
- Support the branch management teams by assessing trust officer performance using the monthly Measures of Success.
- Assess and evaluate timely the adherence to processes and policies by branches in their execution of duties.
- Assess and evaluate randomly that month end reports are done by all branches (Trust Officers).

Client Service and Relationship Management
- Lead a client-focused service culture across the business (inter-branch).
- Support the team in ensuring that all complaints and queries are answered within stipulated timelines.
- Support the business in liaison with the Dispute and Resolution team to manage and reduce complaints.
- Support the business with a streamlined process to record all compliments and complaints and ensure that compliments are also reported monthly.
- Drive initiatives to assess and evaluate each trust officer’s level of client service monthly by implementing surveys or related interventions to improve customer satisfaction levels.

Compliance, Risk, and Regulatory Oversight
- Ensure compliance with all statutory and regulatory frameworks governing trust administration.
- Identify and mitigate operational, compliance and legal risks.
- Evaluate and assess the submission of the IT12TR annual returns and other submissions such as Provisional tax, IT3(b), IT3(t), etc. in liaison with Associated Parties and Group Tax to ensure compliance with the tax regulator (SARS).
- Track and evaluate the finalization of financial statements (system generated with IT and outsourced statements with Associated Parties).
- Track all tax related projects. Manage and evaluate the performance of Associated Parties who are handling outsourced services such as tax submissions and financial s