Senior Stream Lead - Operational Readiness - Insurance

Context

This mission involves leading the end-to-end operational readiness for a major phase of a portfolio migration project within a Belgian life insurance context. The role ensures that Operations and all impacted internal functions can safely administer, service, control, and support the migrated Classic Life and remaining Unit-Linked portfolios from Day 1. The position requires converting migration, product, system, legal, risk, and finance changes into executable processes, trained and adequately staffed teams, controlled cutover activities, business-continuity arrangements, and a stable transition to Business as Usual, while protecting policyholders, brokers, regulatory compliance, and agreed service levels.

Missions

• Lead the operational readiness planning, governance, and execution for the migration waves.

• Chair weekly stream governance meetings and provide evidence-based status updates to cross-stream and Go/No-Go forums.

• Assess operational impacts of change requests and maintain decision traceability.

• Conduct end-to-end impact and gap assessments across Operations, Finance, IT, Legal/Compliance, Risk, Actuarial, and Customer Service.

• Translate stream outputs and historical data into executable processes and exception paths.

• Ensure procedures preserve policy terms, customer rights, audit trails, data protection, AML/sanctions, complaints handling, and legal declarations.

• Define KPIs, reconciliations, control points, maker-checker controls, and accountable process owners.

• Provide operational requirements and acceptance criteria for migration testing, including mass-data testing and exception handling.

• Mobilize SMEs for test support and dry runs; ensure defects and data-quality exceptions are resolved or mitigated.

• Design target organization, RACI, capacity model, skill matrix, access profiles, and segregation of duties.

• Assess workload and staffing impacts, including manual processing, transition peaks, and hyper care demand.

• Own training needs analysis, knowledge transfer, role-based curricula, user guides, and readiness attestations.

• Drive adoption and ensure teams understand the change, execution model, and support channels.

• Own the operational runbook and connect it to the integrated migration/cutover plan.

• Coordinate freeze windows, backlog management, TSA handoffs, staffing rosters, command-centre coverage, and Day-1 activation.

• Define fallback and manual workarounds for delays, instability, data defects, and unavailable calculations/documents.

• Lead hypercare, support incident triage and stabilization until agreed exit criteria and BAU acceptance are achieved.

• Escalate blockers with quantified customer, regulatory, financial, SLA, and schedule impacts and propose credible paths to resolution.

• Ensure operations align with approved product and onboarding outputs.

• Secure review and sign-off from COO/business owners and relevant Legal, Compliance, Risk, Finance, Actuarial, IT, and Data stakeholders.

• Report weekly RAG status on milestones, readiness indicators, risks, defects, training, staffing, and cutover.

• Track resource demand, availability, and budget implications; escalate capacity or skill gaps.

• Coordinate operational dependencies and knowledge transfer.

Tools & Environment

• Hybrid delivery methodologies

• MS Project

• Azure DevOps

• Excel

• Teams/SharePoint

• PPM/RAID tooling

Working Conditions

• Location: Belgium (bilingual business environment)

• Languages required: Dutch, French, English

• Seniority: Senior level

• Minimum 8 years of experience, including 3+ years leading operational readiness, transformation, or migration delivery in insurance/financial services

1. Strong knowledge of Belgian life insurance operations, policy administration and customer/broker servicing
2. Understanding of Classic Life and Unit-Linked products, reserves, premiums, commissions, benefits, buybacks, disability
3. Knowledge of Solvency II, IDD, GDPR, AML/sanctions, product governance, complaints and regulatory/legal reporting is a plus
4. Experience with portfolio/data migrations, cutover, hyper care, business continuity and BAU transition
5. Proficiency with hybrid delivery, MS Project, Azure DevOps, Excel, Teams/SharePoint and PPM/RAID tooling
6. Proven leadership of cross-functional business readiness in insurance or financial services
7. Excellent planning, dependency, risk, issue, decision and action management
8. Strong stakeholder management across business, technology, control functions, vendors and executives
9. Ability to structure ambiguity, challenge constructively and escalate with impact and recommendations
10. Experience designing operating models, RACI, capacity plans, training, scorecards and Go/No-Go evidence
11. Strong cutover and incident-management capability; calm and decisive under pressure
12. Clear executive communication and workshop facilitation
13. Customer- and policyholder-first, with a strong control and regulatory mindset
14. Hands-on, structured and delivery-oriented; owns outcomes rather than only coordinating
15. Proactive and transparent; surfaces weak signals and drives pragmatic paths to green
16. Collaborative but appropriately challenging across business and technology
17. Detail-conscious while retaining an end-to-end view of readiness and BAU sustainability
18. Resilient and comfortable with changing priorities and incomplete information
19. Minimum 8 years of experience, including 3+ years leading operational readiness, transformation or migration delivery in insurance/financial services
20. Languages: English plus Dutch and/or French; ability to operate effectively in Belgium’s bilingual business environment