Senior Project Manager – Financial Services / Mutual Funds
Contract Duration: 6 Months
Location: Toronto, ON
Industry: Financial Services / Investment Management
Position Overview
We are seeking an experienced Senior Project Manager with strong financial services business experience, ideally within Mutual Funds, Asset Management, Wealth Management, Investment Management, or Fund Operations.
The successful candidate will lead complex, cross-functional business and technology initiatives within a highly regulated financial services environment. This role requires a Project Manager who understands financial-services business processes and can effectively work with business leaders, operations teams, technology teams, vendors, risk, compliance, and other stakeholders.
This is not primarily an infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, or technical implementation PM role. The ideal candidate brings strong business-side project leadership combined with sufficient technology knowledge to manage initiatives involving both business and technology teams.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead complex, cross-functional projects from initiation through planning, execution, implementation, and closure.
- Partner closely with business stakeholders to understand objectives, requirements, business processes, dependencies, and expected outcomes.
- Manage business-led transformation, operational improvement, regulatory, product, and technology-enabled initiatives.
- Develop and maintain comprehensive project plans, schedules, milestones, dependencies, budgets, and resource requirements.
- Manage project scope, schedule, cost, quality, risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies.
- Establish project governance and provide clear project status reporting to senior management and executive stakeholders.
- Maintain RAID logs and proactively identify, escalate, and resolve project risks, issues, and dependencies.
- Facilitate workshops and working sessions involving business, operations, technology, risk, compliance, legal, vendors, and other stakeholders.
- Translate business objectives into structured project plans and coordinate execution across multiple workstreams.
- Work closely with Business Analysts, Product Owners, SMEs, technology teams, and vendors throughout the project lifecycle.
- Manage stakeholder expectations and ensure alignment between business objectives and project delivery.
- Support business process analysis, current-state/future-state assessments, requirements definition, and implementation planning.
- Manage project financials, including budgets, forecasts, resource costs, vendor costs, and financial reporting.
- Manage third-party vendors, including deliverables, timelines, dependencies, SOWs, and contractual commitments.
- Lead projects using Agile, Waterfall, and Hybrid delivery methodologies as appropriate.
- Facilitate or support sprint planning, backlog management, release planning, status meetings, steering committees, and executive updates.
- Coordinate testing, implementation readiness, business readiness, change management, communications, training, and production rollout activities.
- Ensure projects comply with organizational governance, risk, regulatory, audit, and change-management requirements.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of Project Management experience, preferably within large, complex enterprise environments.
- Strong experience delivering projects within Banking, Financial Services, Investment Management, Asset Management, Wealth Management, or Mutual Funds.
- Demonstrated experience managing business-focused projects, not solely technology or infrastructure initiatives.
- Strong understanding of financial-services business processes, operations, controls, governance, and regulatory environments.
- Experience leading large cross-functional teams consisting of business and technology stakeholders.
- Strong project planning, governance, RAID management, financial management, and executive reporting capabilities.
- Experience gathering and organizing business requirements and working closely with Business Analysts and business SMEs.
- Strong understanding of project and software development lifecycles.
- Experience with Agile/Scrum, Waterfall, and Hybrid delivery models.
- Excellent stakeholder management, facilitation, communication, negotiation, and conflict-resolution skills.
- Ability to communicate effectively with both senior business executives and technical teams.
- Strong analytical, organizational, and problem-solving capabilities.
- Experience with project management and collaboration tools such as JIRA, Confluence, Microsoft Project, Visio, Excel, and SharePoint.
Preferred Qualifications
- Direct experience within Mutual Funds, Fund Operations, Investment Products, Asset Management, or Wealth Management.
- Experience delivering business transformation, regulatory, operational improvement, product, or process-change initiatives within financial services.
- Previous Business Analyst experience or strong business-analysis capabilities.
- Experience working within highly regulated Canadian financial institutions.
- Experience managing third-party vendors, RFPs, SOWs, budgets, and external delivery partners.
- PMP certification.
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), PSM, PMI-ACP, or similar Agile certification.
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and professional experience.
Ideal Candidate Profile
The ideal candidate is a business-oriented Senior Project Manager with deep financial-services experience who understands how investment or financial-services organizations operate. They can confidently engage senior business stakeholders, understand complex operational and regulatory requirements, and lead multidisciplinary business and technology teams through large-scale change.
Experience specifically within Mutual Funds, Asset Management, Wealth Management, Fund Operations, or Investment Management will be considered highly relevant.
