Talent Pool: Executive: Data Management and Analytics

Guardrisk is the undisputed market leader in cell captive insurance and risk solutions. We are renowned for our innovative approach to cell captive structures and other alternative risk transfer solutions for our clients. Guardrisk offers clients custom designed cover and is registered in South Africa as an insurer for all statutory classes of non-life and life insurance business.

To establish, lead, and continuously enhance the Data Management & Analytics Centre of Excellence, driving the development and execution of enterprise-wide data governance, management, and analytics strategies.

Strategic data leadership

• Lead the implementation of the enterprise data and analytics strategy aligned with business priorities, ensuring delivery of measurable business value.
• Champion data governance, management, and quality initiatives, ensuring compliance with South African regulatory requirements.
• Act as a liaison between business units and technology teams, translating business priorities into scalable, governed, and reusable data and analytics solutions.
• Foster and embed a data-driven culture throughout Guardrisk, driving consistent data practices across all business units.

Data Management & Architecture

• Define and enforce standardised data input formats, source specifications, and data ingestion processes within the Guardrisk ecosystem.
• Maintain and enrich a comprehensive data catalog with clear metadata, lineage, and ownership for transparency and traceability.
• Align cross-functional units on common logic, definitions, joins, and KPIs to ensure enterprise-wide data consistency.
• Continuously monitor data quality metrics, driving remediation efforts and maintaining trust and compliance.
• Lead data governance bodies such as Data Council and Data SteerCos to oversee data governance frameworks.

Use Case Execution for Support Functions

• Develop, operationalise, and oversee analytics use cases for support functions (Finance, Risk, HR, Compliance, Actuarial), particularly where dedicated data teams are absent.
• Integrate trusted datasets and analytics outputs into day-to-day business processes to enable informed decision-making.
• Enforce guardrails to ensure all analytics initiatives adhere to governance and compliance standards.
• Provide technical guidance to internal analytics teams, ensuring alignment with central data architecture and standards.

Data Governance and compliance

• Drive enterprise-wide adoption of central data definitions and datasets, promoting reuse and knowledge sharing.
• Define and enforce data retention, archiving, and lifecycle management policies per regulatory requirements.
• Lead initiatives to enhance metadata management, lineage tracking, and data quality assurance.
• Serve as executive sponsor for data privacy and ethics programs, ensuring lawful and ethical data usage

Technology and IT Partnership

• Collaborate closely with IT leadership to design and maintain data pipelines, storage, and infrastructure that meet business needs.
• Influence IT investments, ensuring data architecture and toolsets are flexible, scalable, and compliant to effectively enable execution of the Data strategy across the enterprise.
• Build and maintain the data pipelines and infrastructure that allows for analytics use case execution

People Leadership

• Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing operations team to achieve strategic and operational objectives. 
• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and performance. 
• Manage capacity, talent development, and succession planning within the operations function

• Bachelor's degree in data science, Statistics, Actuarial Science, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field (Master's preferred).
• At least 8 years of experience in data, analytics, or technology roles within banking, telecommunications, or insurance.
• At least 3 years in a leadership capacity.
• Demonstrated success in bridging business and technology for enterprise-wide data delivery.
• Strong technical expertise in Azure Synapse, SQL, and data integration, Metadata and Master Data Management platforms.
• Proven track record in executing analytics use cases .
• In-depth knowledge of South African data governance and compliance.

• Developing strategies: Is focused on developing strategies; thinks in the longer term and anticipates trends; envisages the future and adopts a visionary approach.
• Providing insights : Is focused on continuously improving things; provides insights by identifying key issues; makes intuitive judgements.
• Upholding standards : Behaves ethically and justly; is discreet and maintains confidentiality; meets commitments by acting with integrity.
• Articulating information: Is articulate in giving presentations; is eloquent and explains things well; projects social confidence when articulating information.
• Directing people: Is comfortable leading people; coordinates and directs groups; seeks to control things.
• Making decisions: Is determined and decides on actions; willingly assumes responsibility; is definitive and stands by own decisions.