Assistant Manager, ALM

Prudential’s purpose is to be partners for every life and protectors for every future. Our purpose encourages everything we do by creating a culture in which diversity is celebrated and inclusion assured, for our people, customers, and partners. We provide a platform for our people to do their best work and make an impact to the business, and we support our people’s career ambitions. We pledge to make Prudential a place where you can Connect, Grow, and Succeed.

This role supports the Director ALM, local business investment and actuarial functions including a focus on supporting investigations of Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA), supporting updates to Capital Market Assumptions (CMA), investigation of various ALM related topics. The role is involved in SAA studies and in working with our Business Units to understand, quantify, and monitor ALM risks, and to identify potential changes which help to address those risks.

Principal Accountabilities: Proactively support the Business Units and Director ALM, in respect of CMA and SAA related areas, including:

• Investigate ALM issues: to understand the sources of ALM risk and the possible responses and formulate recommendations to address these ALM issues.
• Preparing management information: to support communications and decisions relating to new ALM issues as they arise, to provide updates on ongoing issues which require tracking over time, to monitor and quantify existing market risks to identify any potential issues, and to investigate solutions.
• Extend ALM analysis framework: to take account of new ALM analysis requirements arising from ongoing ALM research and enhancements, and in response to new issues.
• Assist Business Units with Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA) reviews: assist Director ALM in recommendations relating to SAA and related areas.  As part of the overall review, ensure that we understand quantitatively the implications of the proposed strategies for the expected outcome under various metrics as well as the risk to delivery against targets including profit and capital targets.
• Research into various ALM-related topics: e.g. asset class characteristics and dynamic asset allocation strategies.  Participate in the related development of asset modelling approaches and refinements, especially relating to our tools for modelling stochastic outcomes for corporate bonds, debt, interest rate hedging strategies, etc.
• Assist in setting Group-wide economic assumptions: for regular reporting, pricing assessment, SAA investigation, management information, Participating business bonus investigation, illustrations, risk appetite assessment and other purposes.  This includes developing new frameworks or enhancing existing frameworks used for setting economic assumptions of new asset classes or markets and working with LBUs to quantify the impacts under different reporting bases, including Embedded Value, GIECA, IFRS and local statutory bases, where applicable.
• Assist in developing and reviewing risk management regimes: for measuring and managing financial risks.

Core Competences Required:

• A technical orientation.  A drive to understand each situation and investigation in sufficient detail to ensure that results of investigations are technically sound and that decision-makers have a good understanding of the trade-offs.
• An understanding of market-consistent valuation, economic capital calculation, embedded value framework, and local statutory capital regime across Asia markets.
• A strong understanding of the financial mechanics of life insurance products, ideally with exposure to discretionary benefit management under participating bonus structures, as well as a good understanding of non-par and universal life.
• An understanding of basic asset classes (fixed income, equity, alternatives) and derivatives from modelling perspective.
• Experience of interpreting the results of stochastic models and based on that experience a degree of intuition about the statistical properties of the likely distributions of outcomes.
• Strong programming skills in e.g. VBA/Excel, Python, R Studio, and the ability to produce clear well-documented code on those occasions when programming is needed.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English, including the ability and desire to produce good documentation of project work and investigation outcomes.
• Ability to initiate and follow through projects either independently or by enlisting the support of the teams in Business Units.
• Ability to work under pressure, flexibly deal with workloads, priorities and deadlines
• Team player who resolves problems through a collaborative, analytical approach.

Education and Experience: 

• At least 4-7 years working experience in the financial services industry in a similar role, asset modelling experience would be an advantage.

Prudential is an equal opportunity employer. We provide equality of opportunity of benefits for all who apply and who perform work for our organisation irrespective of sex, race, age, ethnic origin, educational, social and cultural background, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, disability or part-time / fixed-term work, or any other status protected by applicable law. We encourage the same standards from our recruitment and third-party suppliers taking into account the context of grade, job and location. We also allow for reasonable adjustments to support people with individual physical or mental health requirements.