Chief Operating Officer, Manulife Wealth

Position Responsibilities:

Individual Accountabilities:

Operational Alignment & Execution:

• Drive day-to-day alignment and execution across the business, ensuring coordinated delivery, clarity of priorities, and consistency with strategic and enterprise objectives.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Liaise and collaborate with functional leaders to ensure coordinated execution and alignment to business objectives.

Strategic Execution & Planning:

• Partner with the CEO and executive leadership team to define business objectives, key metrics, organizational vision, and mission, translating strategy into clear priorities and aligned execution across functions.

Subject Matter Expertise & Strategic Initiatives:

• Act as a senior subject matter expert, collaborating across functions to shape and deliver key strategic objectives and enterprise-wide initiatives.

Performance Management & Analytics:

• Champion the use of data and analytics to track business performance, enable transparency, and support informed decision-making across the organization.

Advisor Voice & Experience:

• Ensure the voice of the advisor is actively gathered, understood, and embedded into decision-making, using insights to shape initiatives, enhance the advisor experience, and drive continuous improvement across the business.

Financial Alignment:

• Collaborate with finance and business leaders on budget planning, monitoring, and resource allocation to support disciplined execution and strategic investment.

Branch Leadership (Direct Accountability):

• Lead and oversee Branch Managers (BMs), ensuring effective supervision, compliance adherence, and consistent operational standards across the network. Enable clear communication of regulatory requirements, policies, and business priorities to advisors, driving alignment and accountability.

Advisor Compensation Oversight:

• Oversee the advisor compensation framework (including grid and fee structures), acting as a key stakeholder and subject matter expert while collaborating with finance, strategy, and leadership teams to ensure alignment with business objectives, competitiveness, and profitability.

Process, Policy & Continuous Improvement:

• Champion the review, modernization, and implementation of policies and procedures across the business. Partner closely with the Policy & Process Lead to ensure changes are practical, effectively embedded, and consistently adopted across operations and the advisory network.

Process Improvement & Technology Enablement:

• Identify capability gaps and work in partnership with functional leaders to drive the adoption of improved processes, systems, and technologies that enhance efficiency, scalability, and advisor/client experience.

Revenue & Profitability Optimization:

• Collaborate with business and functional leaders to assess and optimize revenue streams, advisor grid structures, fee models, product offerings, and key relationships to enhance profitability and growth.

Communications & Business Alignment:

• Work closely with communications and marketing teams on the structure and execution of internal and external communications, ensuring the firm’s vision, priorities, and key developments are clearly, consistently, and effectively conveyed.

Organizational Effectiveness:

• Facilitate coordination across functions and geographies to ensure clarity of priorities, efficient execution, and alignment to enterprise goals.

Culture & Leadership:

• Foster a highly inclusive, high-performance culture grounded in accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Talent Development:
Support the development of organizational capability by coaching, mentoring, and engaging talent, while role-modeling leadership behaviours and values.

Required Qualifications:

• Over 15 Years of senior executive experience within the financial services and wealth management industry.

• Bachelor’s degree in relevant field with a graduate degree (MBA) preferred.

• Minimum of 10 years in senior position at an IIROC firm.

• Prior experience as senior leader of an IIROC/MFDA dealer.

• Strong understanding of distribution models in financial services in Canada.

• Established network in the financial services industry.

• Strong knowledge of Canadian insurance industry and MGA landscape.

• Strong knowledge of financial planning, wealth planning and HNW advice business models.

• Demonstrated experience as a successful senior leader of medium to large sized cross functional teams.

• Demonstrated credibility in presenting to senior executive leadership, industry leaders and top advisors.

• Highly developed business and financial acumen, comfortable managing complex business decisions around risk and profitability.

• Ability to influence across all lines of business at all levels within the company.

• Exceptional interpersonal skills with an ability to foster and maintain relationships.

• A strong service focused and continuous improvement mindset.

• Willingness to travel as required.

• Bilingual (French) is an asset.