Middle Office Manager

The Skills You'll Need: Commodities, Middle Office, Strong Excel

Your New Salary: £Highly Competitive

Hybrid: 3 days in office (Central London), 2 at home

Status: Permanent Role

Start: ASAP, notice considered

Working hours: 9am - 5.30pm, Monday - Friday (37.5 hour week)

Who You'll be Working For: International commodity merchant.

Middle Office Manager - What You'll be Doing:

Focus on overseeing and managing operational and control processes to support the cocoa trade. The individual will be a key link between traders, customers, suppliers, finance and trade support functions. The successful candidate will be responsible for ensuring the integrity of commercial transactions, reporting, risk management and timely execution of all post-trade activities.

• Maintain full administrative ownership and control of all cocoa trading contracts from execution through completion.
• Directly manage a team of three Trading Support staff.
• Ensure trader's accurate contract entry, amendments, confirmations, and documentation.
• Monitor contractual obligations and ensure compliance with agreed commercial terms.
• Coordinate closely with traders, operations, logistics, finance, and counterparties.
• Monitor customer receivables and payment performance.
• Follow up on overdue accounts and coordinate collection efforts with finance and commercial teams.
• Escalate to the trader payment risks and disputes in a timely manner.
• Ensure accurate and timely reporting of physical and financial cocoa positions.
• Reconcile trading positions across systems and identify discrepancies.
• Compile the daily, weekly, and monthly exposure reports for management.
• Support risk monitoring and ensure adherence to internal reporting standards.
• Oversee FX exposure reporting related to cocoa trading activities.
• Support traders and management with relevant analytical reporting and performance metrics.
• Ensure consistency and accuracy of valuation methodologies and reporting inputs.
• Coordinate and manage all administrative requirements requested by suppliers and customers.
• Ensure timely provision of contractual, compliance, shipping, invoicing, and settlement documentation.
• Act as a central point of coordination for operational matters involving external counterparties.
• Establish and maintain robust middle-office controls and procedures.
• Ensure compliance with internal policies, regulatory requirements, and audit standards.
• Identify operational risks and implement appropriate mitigating controls.

Middle Office Manager - The Skills You'll Need to Succeed:

• Experience within a commodity environment or similar. Having worked on a Trade Desk.
• The successful candidate will have proficiency with trading, ERP and reporting systems with risk awareness and excellent attention to detail.
• Strong communication and organisation skills are a must in the role, and strong Excel skills are essential.
• Be able to demonstrate strong operational and financial control.
• They will take ownership of their responsibilities, be accountable for delivering results, and possess a continuous process improvement mindset, proactively identify opportunities to enhance efficiency and value across the business.
• Team management experience.
• Be able to travel occasionally to Dubai, 10%

We would be grateful if you could send your CV as a Word document. If your application is successful, you will be contacted within 7 days. We regret that due to the high volume of applications we receive we cannot provide feedback on individual CVs. Please note that we can only consider candidates who are eligible to work in the UK and are able to provide relevant supporting documentation.

People First is committed to increasing diversity, and maintaining an inclusive workplace culture. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, year of birth, relationship status or whether or not they have a disability.

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