The Apex Group was established in Bermuda in 2003 and is now one of the world’s largest fund administration and middle office solutions providers.

Our business is unique in its ability to reach globally, service locally and provide cross-jurisdictional services. With our clients at the heart of everything we do, our hard-working team has successfully delivered on an unprecedented growth and transformation journey, and we are now represented by over circa 13,000 employees across 112 offices worldwide.Your career with us should reflect your energy and passion.

That’s why, at Apex Group, we will do more than simply ‘empower’ you. We will work to supercharge your unique skills and experience.

Take the lead and we’ll give you the support you need to be at the top of your game. And we offer you the freedom to be a positive disrupter and turn big ideas into bold, industry-changing realities.

For our business, for clients, and for you

Summary of the position

The Specialist: Investment Compliance Support Services is first and foremost the regulatory specialist in the Investment Compliance Support Services (“ICSS”) team.

The ICSS team reports both regulatory and bespoke mandate compliance breaches to clients daily on a post-trade basis and provides the functionality to our clients for monitoring breaches on a pre-trade basis as well, from NX Manager. The team also produce monthly regulatory holdings reports to clients, run from the data warehouse, and enriched with data from both InvestOne and NXManager. External Manager look-through is performed for monthly reporting.

The role requires good knowledge/experience across the investment and operational cycle. The role largely entails the interpretation of both mandates and legislation/regulation to effectively translate the regulation into workable compliance rule results, upon which our clients depend for guiding their investment decisions within client mandates and prescribed regulation. The role will collaborate within the ICSS team and other relevant teams to ensure that the interpretation is successfully applied to both the NX Manager platform (enabling pre- and post-trade compliance) as well as the Compliance Reporting Warehouse. Whilst the primary focus of the role is thus the interpretation of mandates / regulation / legislation, there is also a requirement to have a working knowledge and understanding of the process of converting this interpretation into rules within the technology platform. Therefore, strong technical or operational knowledge of investment instruments and issuers is required, as well as experience on NX Manager (preferred) or another comparable compliance monitoring system is ideal.

In support of the above, the basis of successful compliance rule monitoring and reporting is the continual oversight on static and market data to ensure correct classification into regulatory rulesets. You will be required to assist with the processing of external manager data and mapping instruments for ingesting into the Apex systems and thus will work closely with the Instrument and Fund Setup team to update and maintain static data integrity for investment compliance purposes. Data and issuer market capitalization checks will be required.

Outline of main duties and responsibilities

• Developing, coding, and implementing compliance rules to NX Manager for European and local clients.
• Working with portfolio managers to facilitate smooth operation of pre-trade compliance rules. Investigating and troubleshooting issues that may occur.
• Troubleshooting classification issues, cleaning static data to support daily monitoring and monthly report integrity.
• Critically reviewing compliance rules to improve integrity on an ongoing basis.
• Following proper test protocol in UAT environment and change control protocol of rules into the production environment.
• Support the efforts within the ICSS team in respect of interpreting and documenting legislative, regulatory and mandate compliance requirements applicable for use in NX Manager and the Compliance Reporting Warehouse.
• Documenting the interpretation of legislative or regulatory changes, in a manner which allows for these documents to be circulated internally at Apex or externally to clients, and input into planning for these changes. Testing of all changes and developments.
• Being pro-active in solution-finding and regularly question processes and “status quo’s” to constantly improve.
• Providing professional support to the Apex client base both in South Africa and in other jurisdictions in respect of compliance related queries, including interpretation, breaches, reporting, etc.
• Reporting: Rotation of daily post-trade reporting; monthly compliance reporting (Reg28 and Reg30).
• Monthly pre-reporting checks to ensure sound and consistent instrument and issuer classifications for monthly reporting.
• Build excellent rapport with clients in developing their confidence in our service offering, by ensuring your full understanding of their requirements, and maintaining such well-managed relationships to achieve the best results for the clients.
• Supporting the business development effort in expanding the Compliance Support Services function, thinking with a business brain.
• Actively strive to live by and operate within the Apex core values.
• Actively drive and contribute to a culture of quality/excellence, through risk awareness and adherence to compliance standards and all relevant operational controls and processes.

Required Skills and Experience

The successful candidate will possess:

• An accounting or business degree (minimum B. Com or equivalent) together with at least 4-5 years fund administration/management experience in a compliance related role.
• Certificate in Compliance Management.
• Strong numerical and analytical skills to review fund compliance reports in detail and respond to queries. The role requires excellent Excel skills to analyze portfolio exposures and structures, and to enable manual calculation of desired compliance rule outputs.
• Agile and flexible thinking (“thinking on your feet”), creative thinking for solving problems.
• Strong knowledge of the full investment process starting from the portfolio manager’s investment decision through operational process to client reporting.
• Strong investment compliance experience with UCITS regulation and European investment monitoring and instruments.
• Solid knowledge and understanding of the regulatory investment limits dominant in the Republic of South Africa such as Regulation 28, CISCA, Regulation 30, and how various instruments apply to these regulations.
• Attention to detail, methodical and structured work approach.
• Excellent communication and negotiation skills, both written and verbal, as the ICSS team is dependent on downstream operations. The rule requires confident interaction with all areas of the business to perform team tasks, as well as interacting with clients on a day-to-day basis in respect of investment compliance issues.
• Confident, committed and self-motivated individual and able to work under pressure.
• Positive attitude.
• German fluency an advantage

Other requirements

The role will require commitment to completion of tasks for clients that are set by deadlines. This will from time to time require longer hours.

Reporting structure

The Specialist: Investment Compliance Support Services will report to the Senior Manager: Investment Compliance Support Services, based in the Mowbray, Cape Town office.

Additional information:

We are an equal opportunity employer and ensure that no applicant is subject to less favorable treatment on the grounds of gender, gender identity, marital status, race, color, nationality, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, socio-economic, responsibilities for dependents, physical or mental disability. Any hiring decision are made based on skills, qualifications, and experiences

Disclaimer: Unsolicited CVs sent to Apex (Talent Acquisition Team or Hiring Managers) by recruitment agencies will not be accepted for this position. Apex operates a direct sourcing model and where agency assistance is required, the Talent Acquisition team will engage directly with our exclusive recruitment partners.