Chief Operations Officer

Major multinational life insurer – Southeast Asia (Emerging Market)

The opportunity

A well-established multinational life insurer with a significant and growing presence across Southeast Asia is seeking a Chief Operations Officer. This is a hands-on operational leadership role at the heart of a business that takes its tied agency force seriously – and is investing accordingly.

The mandate is focused: move the business away from manual, paper-heavy processes towards streamlined, digitised operations that make life genuinely easier for agents and customers alike. The goal is not transformation for its own sake – it is giving a high-performing agency force the tools and experience to sell more, more efficiently.

What you will own

• Operational process improvement – identifying, prioritising and eliminating the friction that slows agents down and erodes the customer experience
• Digitisation of core back and middle office functions, moving legacy manual workflows to scalable, automated processes
• The agent operational experience – onboarding, licensing, policy issuance, servicing – ensuring agents spend their time selling, not navigating internal complexity
• Customer journey quality across key touchpoints: new business, policy servicing, and claims
• Operational readiness and execution – turning strategy into delivery

Who we are looking for

You are a senior operations leader with meaningful experience inside a life insurance business of genuine scale. You understand how tied agency models work in practice – the rhythms, the friction points, and what it actually takes to help agents perform. You have delivered operational improvement programmes that stuck, and you know the difference between a well-run ops function and a well-written ops strategy.

Current or recent COO experience is the benchmark. Candidates from deputy COO or equivalent roles will be considered where they bring prior COO experience or come from a significantly larger market or regional/group remit.

Fluency in the realities of Southeast Asian insurance markets – regulatory, cultural, and commercial – is essential.

Please note: this role is not based in Singapore. The location field reflects search indexing only – the position is based in another high-growth Southeast Asian market. Successful candidates must be open to relocation.

About Oliver James

Oliver James Executive is the senior hires practice of Oliver James, specialising in C-suite search across the insurance sector in Asia. All approaches are handled in strict confidence.