About Vanguard
More than 50 years ago, John C. Bogle had a vision to start an investment company that did things differently. A company with no external shareholders. Where all the profits were invested back into the business and used to lower costs. Evidently, it was as bold as it was brilliant. To this day, Vanguard Group still has no external shareholders. That means no share prices to protect, and no profits to generate for outside owners.
Today, Vanguard is one of the world’s largest investment management companies, serving more than 50 million investors worldwide. For more than 25 years Vanguard Australia has been supporting individual investors, financial advisers, and superannuation members to achieve their long-term financial goals.
Team and Opportunity
The Specialist, Operational Oversight supports the delivery of operational excellence by executing oversight and quality assurance activities across high-risk functions. This role plays a key part in ensuring consistent, efficient, and compliant processes across the team encompassing Superannuation and Direct Investments (including Adviser +). It contributes to exception handling, oversight monitoring, vendor governance, and continuous improvement initiatives that enhance client outcomes and operational resilience.
They will provide support to other crew within the team, providing guidance, coaching, and quality assurance, while also flexing up to support the Manager with planning, stakeholder engagement, and strategic initiatives. The Specialist is expected to lean into operational tasks as needed, ensuring seamless delivery and readiness across the team.
Key Responsibilities
Operational Oversight & Enablement
- Lead and execute oversight activities across Superannuation and Direct Investments, ensuring monitoring, checks, and reviews are performed accurately and on time
- Apply subject matter expertise to oversee client, member, and adviser operational processes, identifying risks, inefficiencies, and service impacts.
- Support the implementation of scalable, data-informed solutions that improve process efficiency and client experience.
- Lead, create and contribute to the maintenance of oversight and QA programs for critical BAU processes including monitoring, exception handling and issue resolution.
- Ensure oversight outputs are clearly documented, auditable, and aligned to internal standards.
- Support crew members in delivering a resilient and effective oversight model through guidance, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem-solving.
- Support licensee and adviser onboarding and maintenance processes.
Risk & Quality Assurance
- Execute and continuously enhance quality assurance (QA) programs across high-risk and high-volume processes.
- Collaborate closely and drive initiatives with the Operational Controls team to support the management of risks and issues.
- Lead & support the design, implementation and performance of control activities in compliance with regulatory and platform obligations, including control testing and oversight reviews.
- Apply and enhance control frameworks to monitor high-risk functions, including manual processes and exception handling to identify control gaps, emerging risks and recurring themes, and escalate appropriately.
- Oversee governance monitoring activities such as unallocated money, asset allocation, account closures, licensee attestations and other regulatory checks.
- Lead quarterly QA reviews and contribute to SLA/KPI monitoring, including tracking performance, identifying breaches, and supporting remediation activities.
Vendor & Platform Governance
- Support oversight of third-party service providers (e.g. administrators), ensuring performance meets contractual and operational expectations.
- Participate in third-party vendor interactions, operational meetings and issue resolution discussions on operational matters.
- Monitor vendor outputs, identify trends or service degradation and escalate risks or issues and provide updates to the Manager and Head of Operational Oversight.
- Contribute to strengthening governance frameworks, including clarity of roles, responsibilities and oversight activities across high-risk areas and trending issues.
Exception Management & Continuous Improvement
- Lead investigation and resolution of operational exceptions, ensuring root cause analysis is performed and documented.
- Identify trends from BAU oversight activities and recommend scalable process improvements.
- Contribute to initiatives that improve operational efficiency, reduce risk exposure, and enhance client outcomes.
- Support automation and optimisation opportunities across QA, monitoring and reporting activities.
Operational Culture & Collaboration
- Partner closely with Operational Controls, Client & Adviser Services, Risk, Compliance and other stakeholders to manage risks and issues effectively.
- Drive cross-team collaboration within the Service & Operational Excellence team by delivering focused, scalable, and efficient services for our clients. Be accountable for service delivery, ensuring genuine care is shown in the moments that matter, both individually and as part of the broader team.
- Build strong working relationships across teams to enable effective oversight and issue resolution,
- Promote shared ways of working and open communication within the team and collaborate with peers and leaders to support team cohesion and resilience.
- Participate in cross-functional initiatives and contribute to broader oversight deliverables.
Team Support, Capability & Leadership
- Provide guidance, coaching and day-to-day support to crew members.
- Promote knowledge sharing and uplift team capability across oversight processes and risk awareness.
- Support the Manager, Operational Oversight with planning, prioritisation and stakeholder engagement where required, including stepping in to support leadership or representing the team in forums.
Key Skills & Attributes
- Strong understanding of operational risk, controls, oversight principles and vendor governance.
- Strong analytical mindset with attention to detail and process improvement along with the ability to translate data and observations into actionable insights.
- Effective communicator with the ability to clearly articulate risks, issues and recommendations along with strong problem-solving skills.
- Solid sense of ownership for outcomes, with the ability to manage tasks independently and follow through to resolution.
- Ability to operate effectively in a dynamic environment with evolving priorities.
Experience & Qualifications
- Proven experience in operations, operational risk, control assurance or vendor oversight within financial services.
- Demonstrated experience executing quality assurance, monitoring or control testing activities across operational processes.
- Experience working within with regulated environments, with exposure to compliance obligations and control frameworks (e.g., GS007).
- Exposure to third-party vendor management, including performance management and issue resolution..
- Proven ability to contribute to process improvements, control uplift initiatives or operational transformation activities.
- Tertiary qualifications in Business, Finance, Commerce, Risk Management or related discipline or equivalent practical experience.
Inclusion Statement
Vanguard’s continued commitment to diversity and inclusion is firmly rooted in our culture. Every decision we make to best serve our clients, crew (internally employees are referred to as crew), and communities is guided by one simple statement: “Do the right thing.”
We believe that a critical aspect of doing the right thing requires building diverse, inclusive, and highly effective teams of individuals who are as unique as the clients they serve. We empower our crew to contribute their distinct strengths to achieving Vanguard’s core purpose through our values.
When all crew members feel valued and included, our ability to collaborate and innovate is amplified, and we are united in delivering on Vanguard’s core purpose.
Our core purpose: To take a stand for all investors, to treat them fairly, and to give them the best chance for investment success.
How We Work
Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.
