Investment Accounting Controller

Summary

Join Fortitude Reinsurance Company Ltd. as their SVP, Investment Accounting Controller and lead the Investment Accounting department. This role is responsible for the accurate accounting, financial statement disclosures, and compilation of monthly and quarterly investment data. You will transform the department, build a high-performing team, develop investment accounting systems, integrate new portfolios, and enhance controls. The ideal candidate has demonstrated leadership and transformation experience in investment accounting and financial reporting for a life and annuity insurance company or reinsurance company, as well as public company experience. This hybrid position, based in Nashville, TN, reports to the Chief Accounting Officer. The role involves managing and enhancing review procedures, acting as Chair for the Investments Pricing and Valuation Committee, and working with various teams to ensure accurate and well-documented reconciliations.

Requirements

• Demonstrated progressive leadership of large teams including multiple management levels
• Demonstrated experience building / transforming organizations and operating environments
• Mentor and develop the investment accounting team, providing guidance and opportunities for professional growth
• Drive innovation and adoption of new technologies and ways of working
• Foster a collaborative and inclusive team culture, encouraging teamwork and mutual respect
• Ability to develop and implement long-term strategic plans that align with the organization's financial goals and investment strategies
• Minimum 10 years accounting experience, with 8 or more years of investment accounting experience with an insurance company or public accounting firm
• Professional accounting designation, CPA or Equivalent required
• Investments reporting and public company controls experience required
• Demonstrated strong analytical and project management skills
• Demonstrated ability to apply U.S. GAAP and STAT investment accounting principles and reporting and experience with Life, Annuities and Property Casualty lines of business
• Proven track record for exceeding expectations on various, simultaneous projects with tight deadlines
• Capable of communicating and expressing ideas clearly and concisely, in both written and verbal formats
• Review forecasts and trends and identify potential issues and opportunities
• Ability to build and maintain working relationships with internal and external asset managers, accounting, compliance, actuarial, management, and systems team from early career to executive level

Responsibilities

• Build and lead a high-performing team of investment accounting leaders and professionals, providing mentorship and guidance to develop skills aligned with team priorities (a leader of leaders)
• Manage team priorities and workloads to ensure that work is well-balanced across the department without key person dependencies
• Model excellent leadership behaviors
• Cultivate a culture of continuous learning so all team members understand our investment portfolio positions and roles are cross trained. Identify and facilitate training, coaching and development to enhance team capabilities and enable career growth
• Foster a continuous improvement / growth mindset culture across the team. Develop after action plans with strong execution on clear concrete remediation plans to evolve the operating environment
• Work with Data & Analytics to automate data feeds, journal entries, reconciliations and reporting / analytics
• Manage and enhance review procedures to verify that investment data is appropriately posted to the general ledger for all basis of accounting within agreed timeframes
• Act as the Chair for the Investments Pricing and Valuation Committee to execute on Fortitude’s governance requirements to provide Executive Management transparency of portfolio valuation judgements
• Monitor and assess the team’s performance in conducting accurate and well documented reconciliations across all investment financial applications (e.g. SAP, Clearwater, FactSet, Data Lake, etc.) with appropriate corrections in source systems as needed
• Provide company standard for workpapers compliant with corporate governance policies including, but not limited to, end user control standards that minimize back and forth between reviewers, internal auditor or external auditors. Areas found to be deficient are addressed and remediated in a timely manner
• Work with the New Transaction Integration team to absorb new transactions into business-as-usual activities
• Ensure that accounting conclusions are properly documented and maintained. As an example, validate that positions have been evaluated for potential VIE / VOE treatment and that investment listings are complete
• Have a strong understanding of what the portfolio performance expectations should be in various economic environments to help inform analysis performed by the Investment Accounting team
• Implement framework to ensure timely granular analysis and attribution (including but not limited to investment yield analysis) is performed to determine that the numbers are right and proactively identify issues
• Provide insights to users of the actual investment information to understand the story behind the numbers
• Partner closely with Forecasting team to share updates to forward-looking expectations
• Develop a consistent reporting package that can be used by all stakeholders for financial reporting / planning purposes
• Lead a quarterly call with Executive leaders and critical stakeholders to walk through investment valuation procedures and actual investment results / analysis
• Provide detailed investments data for Economic Balance Sheet calculation and Bermuda reporting and US NAIC RBC reporting
• Assist in preparation quarterly earnings report and audited financial statements including footnotes
• Assist in compilation of quarterly and yearly footnotes, MD&A, Statutory investment exhibits, debt reporting covenants, pricing committee and audit committee reports
• Build and maintain the investment accounting internal control environment to company standard
• Facilitate and assist with internal and external audit, related testing and complete audit work papers for interim and Year-end audits

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree or Graduate Degree in Accounting, Finance or Economics preferred
• Experience with Clearwater investment accounting platform highly desired

Benefits

• Annual bonus based on company and individual performance
• Generous benefits package