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Assurance Manager - Financial Services
KPMG is part of a global network of firms that offers Audit, Tax, Consulting, Deal Advisory and Technology services. Through the talent of over 16,000 colleagues, we bring our creativity and insight to our clients’ most critical challenges.

With offices across the UK, we work with everyone from small start-ups and individuals to major multinationals, in virtually every industry imaginable. Our work is often complex, yet our vision is simple: to be the clear choice for our clients, for our people and for the communities we work in.

To support our growing assurance business across Financial Services Audit we have a fantastic opportunity for Managers to join our team and provide companies across Banking, Asset Management and Insurance sectors, including those from the FTSE 100, with assurance over a wide variety of topics. These topics include regulatory compliance, regulatory reporting (including capital and liquidity); and governance. They will be responsible for delivering assurance engagements from within an exciting and newly formed Assurance hub.
You will work directly with senior management and audit partners as well as being exposed to senior stakeholders both internally and externally to the firm. These interactions will allow you to expand you industry knowledge and ultimately deliver insights and best practices to our clients.

We appreciate that everybody has their own unique circumstances and we will do our best to accommodate yours, creating a schedule that works for you and allows you to have the work-life balance that you are looking for.

Our Intelligent Working scheme covers a variety of options among which:
• Part-time working
• Glide time, which means starting work between 8:00am and 10:00am and finishing between 4:00pm and 6:00pm
• Working from home for one or more days every week
• Unpaid leave, in which you choose to take up to three months off work without pay

Many members of our team currently make use of our flexible working policy. Follow the link below to find out more about how this works for them, but also how you could benefit from it too:
https://www.kpmgcareers.co.uk/who-we-are/being-inclusive/intelligent-working


Roles and Responsibilities
• Responsible for the end-to-end delivery of allocated assurance projects on Financial Services clients in accordance with ISAE 3000 and the firm’s quality standards
• Managing a portfolio of complex clients across multiple sectors, maintaining contact with the client and members of the client delivery team
• Managing onshore and offshore teams conducting testing across multiple assurance engagements across a range of SME topics simultaneously
• Planning and performing effective assurance procedures and overseeing the delegation of work across the team and the involvement of subject matter experts
• Preparing and reviewing assurance work, exercising professional scepticism
• Preparing assurance opinions, issues logs and management reports, agreeing assurance findings with the Engagement Leader and the client
• Managing engagement budgets, profitability and any fee overruns
• Support in developing and improving the standardised FS Assurance work programmes
• Identifying, researching and helping to resolve complex assurance issues or escalate as appropriate.
• Building relationships with the client staff and act as an ambassador for the firm.
• Supporting the team in business development initiatives and managing the sales pipeline


Qualifications and Skills
The ideal candidate will meet the following criteria:

- Inquisitive mind with a strong passion for Banking, Asset Management and/or Insurance.
- Familiarity with the role of key functions in Banking, Asset Management and/or Insurance.
- Knowledge of new regulatory developments impacting Financial Services clients. Subject matter expertise in areas such as UK Stewardship Code, ESG or regulatory (capital and liquidity) reporting may be advantageous.
- Experience (minimum 5 years) in a related field, including experience of delivering assurance engagements for global FTSE 100 clients
- A 2:1 degree or above from a recognised university or institution
- Relevant financial qualifications may include CFA, ACA, ACCA or equivalent.
- Significant risk management experience at Senior Manager level
- An ability to effectively communicate with a wide range of individuals both internally and externally.
- Strong presentation skills and the confidence to facilitate meetings and interviews both internally and externally
- Outstanding communication and reporting writing skills and ability to influence and deal with senior stakeholders
- Drive and resilience and ability to thrive in a pressured environment
- Focus on delivering high quality work whilst maintaining excellent attention to detail
- Strong project management techniques including decision-making ability, analytical skills, time management, organisation and evaluative skills.
- IT literacy with sound knowledge and experience of Excel/Word/ PowerPoint

Tax and Legal Technology Team
We are a team of 100+ technologists providing technology enablement services and solutions across the Tax and Legal business. This business has 250+ tax & legal professionals covering multiple disciplines.

The team is made up of Product Owners, Business Analysts, Multi-disciplinary Engineering teams and IT Service delivery professionals working on a large portfolio of systems used to improve productivity and solve key business problems across Tax & Legal.

We also build cutting edge web portals for clients to interact with KPMG, maximising collaboration and ensuring seamless delivery of information to our clients.



The Role
The Software Quality Assurance Engineer will work as part of our development team to carry out comprehensive quality assurance testing for all product developments, enhancements and fixes for our software, which will include release and system testing with usage of automation. The purpose of the role is to ensure that the quality of our software is maintained at the highest possible levels, increasing the satisfaction of customers and reducing the number of issues using automated technologies.


In this role you will …
* Work as part of an agile software development team, ensuring high quality software releases.
* Use automated test technologies on projects to create and update comprehensive regression test suites
* Use C#, Selenium and SpecFlow to build automated test deployed on an AzureDev Ops continuous delivery pipeline.
* Review functional and design specifications to ensure full understanding of individual deliverables.
* Develop, document and maintain functional test cases, plans and other test artefacts like test data, data validation scripts, harness scripts and automated scripts.
* Isolate, replicate, and report defects and verify defect fixes.
* Establish good testing practices and strategies.
* Ensure that validated deliverables meet functional requirements and design specifications
* Create, execute and report on manual and automated test execution, escalate critical issues where necessary.
* Work independently on projects.


You will have ...
* A passion for delivering quality software focusing on excellent user experience and high fidelity to visual design
* Experience in user interface testing including designing and creating automated frameworks using Selenium or similar tools.
* Programming in C#, Java or similar object-oriented programming language
* Experience of using BDD tools such as SpecFlow or Cucumber
* Skilled at creating clear, concise, detail-oriented test plans and test cases
* Experience of using test management tools such as Zephyr and JIRA
* Used SQL to write databases queries to assist with testing


You may have ...
* Experience understanding and creating test plans from specifications or verbal communications* Experience in performance testing using Apache JMeter, BlazeMeter or equivalent tools* Knowledge of BrowserStack or similar tools* Experience participating in user acceptance testing* Exposure to testing APIs manually or through automated tests* Ability to communicate confidently and effectively with external/internal stakeholders both written and verbally* Manual or automated testing experience on Mobile platforms

The best of both worlds

We might be world leaders, but in many ways the department feels like a start-up, with a twist. There’s the buzz of scrum working, the thrill of shaping compelling experiences, the chance to surprise and stretch yourself in response to a fresh challenge. And then there’s all the resources, technology and high-profile projects of a major corporate entity. Crucially, we also offer the benefit of clear career progression.

** These roles can be based anywhere in the UK, with travel to Glasgow and London when required for collaboration meetings **

Tax and Legal Technology Team
We are a team of 150+ technologists providing technology enablement services and solutions across the Tax and Legal business. This business has 250+ tax & legal professionals covering multiple disciplines.

The team is made up of Product Owners, Business Analysts, Multi-disciplinary Engineering teams and IT Service delivery professionals working on a large portfolio of systems used to improve productivity and solve key business problems across Tax & Legal.

We also build cutting edge web portals for clients to interact with KPMG, maximising collaboration and ensuring seamless delivery of information to our clients.

The Role
You will be leading the team of 2-3 QA Engineers working on variety of projects across the Tax and Legal Technology team. You will be continuously monitoring and guiding the testers to achieve the highest quality and QA standards. You will work as part of our development team to carry out comprehensive quality assurance testing for all product developments, enhancements and fixes for our software, which will include release and system testing with usage of automation. The purpose of the role is to ensure that the quality of our software is maintained at the highest possible levels, increasing the satisfaction of customers and reducing the number of issues using automated technologies.

In this role you will …
• Work as part of an agile software development team, ensuring high quality software releases
• Review functional and design specifications to ensure full understanding of individual deliverables
• Develop, document and maintain functional test cases and other test artefacts like test data, data validation scripts and test harness
• Isolate, replicate, and report defects and verify defect fixes
• Establish good testing practices and strategies
• Create and update test automation scripts
• Establish the use of automated test technologies on projects wherever suitable.
• Test case reviews with cross-functional team members
• Create test plans and test closure reports
• Work independently on projects.
• Take an active role in mentoring and supporting development of junior team members

You will have ...
• A passion for delivering quality software focusing on excellent user experience and high fidelity to visual design
• Experience in designing and creating automated frameworks using Selenium or similar tools.
• Experience in C#, Java or similar object orientated programming language.
• Experience of using BDD tools such as SpecFlow or Cucumber
• Ability to create clear, concise, detail-oriented test plans and test cases
• Experience of using test management tools such as Zephyr and Jira
• Experience in implementing different testing techniques
• Ability to perform Integration and End to End testing
• Experience in capturing the Risks and implementing the mitigation process
• Ability to collaborate with Development team and business experts


You may have ...
• Experience in creating Test Strategy document
• Experience in performance testing using Apache JMeter, BlazeMeter or similar tools
• Ability to both lead and participate in the User Acceptance Testing
• Exposure to testing APIs manually or through automated tests
• Ability to communicate confidently and effectively with external/internal stakeholders
• A good understanding of the technical architecture of complex web applications
• Mobile testing experience through Manual or Automation
• Experience using BrowserStack or similar tools
• Exposure to Test containerisation using technologies such as Docker
• Experience in maintaining test pipelines using continuous integration tools like Jenkins / TeamCity/ADO
• An understanding of microservices architecture
• Query SQL and other databases for testing


The best of both worlds

We might be world leaders, but in many ways the department feels like a start-up, with a twist. There’s the buzz of scrum working, the thrill of shaping compelling experiences, the chance to surprise and stretch yourself in response to a fresh challenge. And then there’s all the resources, technology and high-profile projects of a major corporate entity. Crucially, we also offer the benefit of clear career progression.

The Team

To support our growing sustainability/ESG (‘Environmental, Social and Governance’) and non-financial information assurance business across Audit we have a fantastic opportunity for Assistant Managers to join our team and assist in providing large corporate companies in different sectors, including those from the FTSE 100, with assurance over a wide variety of topics.

These topics include Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, waste, water, community investment, sustainable supply chains, health and safety (H&S), diversity, gender pay gap, responsible investing and other non-financial information.

They will be responsible for delivering these assurance engagements from within an exciting and newly formed Assurance hub. And they will also have the opportunity to support on providing ESG reporting advice to non-audit clients.

We appreciate that everybody has their own unique circumstances and we will do our best to accommodate yours, creating a schedule that works for you and allows you to have the work-life balance that you are looking for.

Our Intelligent Working scheme covers a variety of options which includes:
• Part-time working
• Glide time, which means starting work between 8:00am and 10:00am and finishing between 4:00pm and 6:00pm
• Working from home for one or more days every week
• Unpaid leave, in which you choose to take up to three months off work without pay

Many members of our team currently make use of our flexible working policy. Follow the link below to find out more about how this works for them, but also how you could benefit from it too:
https://www.kpmgcareers.co.uk/who-we-are/being-inclusive/intelligent-working


The Role - Responsibilities

• You will work with managers to deliver sustainability/ESG assurance and reporting advice on specific clients, working to agree timetables, developing the scope of work and deliverables, drafting and working through work programmes, conducting testing and carrying out assurance fieldwork, reporting and project management.
• Delivering engagements in line with the assurance standards ISAE 3000 and ISAE 3410 or equivalent.
• Preparing the documentation on the assurance file in line with KPMG’s quality standards and our internal KPMG Assurance Manual.
• Juggle multiple client requests when working on different sustainability/ESG Assurance engagements
• Assist the manager in completing engagement and client acceptance procedures
• Reporting to the manager on the engagement on progress, findings and client deliverables.
• Draft engagement letters for known/current/ongoing sustainability/ESG Assurance work
• Coach and oversee work performed by onshore and offshore juniors
• Support the manager in engagement finances and budgeting
• Support in developing and improving the standardised Assurance work programmes
• Identifying, researching and helping to resolve complex sustainability/ESG assurance issues.
• Building relationships with the client staff and acting as an ambassador for the firm.


The Person - ideal candidate will meet the following criteria:

- Inquisitive mind with a strong passion for sustainability and ESG issues.
- Willingness and demonstrated experience in quickly and effectively climbing learning curves.
- Some years of experience in a sustainability/environmental related field, including experience of delivering sustainability assurance engagements for large clients (ideally FTSE 350 or equivalent) under ISAE 3000 and ISAE 3410.
- A 2:1 degree or above from a recognised university or institution in a sustainability/ESG related degree or equivalent work experience
- Strong understanding of industry reporting frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, TCFD and the GHG Protocol.
- An ability to effectively communicate with a wide range of individuals both internally and externally.
- Ability to identify and resolve issues, or escalate as appropriate.
- Drive and resilience and ability to thrive in a pressured environment.
- Focus on delivering high quality work whilst maintaining excellent attention to detail.
- Strong project management techniques including decision-making ability, analytical skills, time management, organisation and evaluative skills.
- IT literacy with sound knowledge and experience of Excel/Word/PowerPoint.

The FS team within Technology Risk Consulting services national and international FS clients including all sectors i.e banks, insurance companies and wealth management. Our engagements often take place in an international context which, subject to Covid-19 restrictions, requires us to provide services across the globe, often in close cooperation with other KPMG offices.
Within this team a key objective is to grow our capability to provide Independent Programme Assurance (IPA) services to our clients. This service delivers value by providing an independent review and challenge in relation to IT enabled Transformation and change programmes and by providing constructive challenge to client management concerning the various risks to the delivery of the full business value of programmes. This can include specific reviews of key programme areas including Business Case, Programme Governance, Programme Planning, Programme Management, Risk/Issue Management, Change and Communications and Configuration Management.
Typical activities include:
• Responsibility for quality, value add and timely delivery of the overall output from client engagements
• Scoping, financial management, managing delivery risk, production and review of deliverables
• Building and managing excellent client relationships (typically at CIO / CFO/ Project Sponsor level)
• Actively identifying and progressing business development opportunities, as well as managing sales activities such as proposal writing and assisting with client presentations
• Coaching and developing team members on engagements
The Role
Frequently our clients seek our support to help them keep their large change programmes and projects on track. Our help is often termed ‘Independent Programme Assurance’, as it seeks to provide client leadership with our independent view/ assurance on what is going well and what needs adjustment in their change/ IT programmes.
This service delivers value by providing independent feedback and constructive challenge to client management concerning the various risks to the delivery of the full business value of programmes. Our engagements are very varied and can range from specific risk based review (for example Testing, Configuration Management, Business Change) to ongoing assurance on a strategic programme for a number of years. Our work may be commissioned directly by the client (usually by the Programme Executive Sponsor or Director) or through an assurance channel such as Internal or External Audit.
As an Assistant Manager within the team, in addition to delivery of client work and day to day support in management of teams, you will support the growth of IPA service line within Technology Risk through assisting with business development (sales), account management, solution development and team development, as requested.

Responsibilities include:

- Delivery of excellent client engagements – specifically in attending and contributing in client meetings and interviews, document review and support in engagement logistics, client fieldwork, research, issue capture and analysis,
Sales – actively identifying and communicating business development opportunities that arise during an IPA engagement, as well as supporting sales activities such as proposal writing and assisting with client proposals covering IPA services.
- Sales – supporting sales and marketing initiatives to protect and grow our credentials and presence in the marketplace.
- Account management – supporting the IPA management team in managing relationships at key accounts, expanding relationships through identifying incremental revenue and client service team participation.
- Service development – ownership and management of our IPA collateral database and knowledge sharing sites. Support to organisation and running of IPA team meetings.
- Training – assist in the development and delivery of training materials for IPA Foundation and Practitioner courses. Initial attendance at both courses will be required.
- Team development - coaching and developing more junior team members on IPA methodology and tools. - Delivery of value-added technology risk consulting and assurance services to Financial Services clients

The Person
Qualifications and Skills:

- Proven experience of supporting technology risk services and IT audit / assurance services, possibly in a PMO context
- Experience of big 4 professional services or dynamic IT consultancy environment, within a relevant market is advantageous
- Degree/ Masters or equivalent qualification
- Project management qualification (Prince 2, MSP, PMI, PPM) would be advantageous

Experience and Background:

- Experience of working in large IT enabled change programmes, or significant workstreams in programmes e.g. design, testing and/ or delivery of assurance reviews of such programmes
- Experience in business analysis and understanding of core business processes within relevant markets
- Experience of core systems - including transaction processing and financial ledger systems
- Ability to develop excellent client and internal relationships
- Ability to deliver required work within tight timescales, to budget and to a high quality
- Experience in business development and sales and marketing activities would be advantageous.
- Experience of contributing to developing and implementing solutions, products or services.