Operations Analyst

About the Role
An exciting opportunity has arisen to join a new financial markets venture in Oman, backed by prominent institutional investors. As the business builds its operations from the ground up, we are looking for an Operations Analyst to play a key role in establishing the operational processes and controls required for managing multiple asset classes and currencies across different markets and time zones. This position will involve working on a rotating shift pattern, covering operations from Sunday to Friday. Flexibility and comfort with shift-based working are essential for this role.

What You'll Do

• Monitor settlement instructions, processing dashboards, and matching queues across approved products and currencies during your assigned shift.
• Oversee automated settlement cycles and batch processing, investigating failures, and confirming cash and securities movements with settlement banks and custodians as necessary.
• Identify, document, and investigate settlement exceptions, tracking outstanding items through to resolution.
• Monitor settlement failures and escalate persistent or unresolved issues within set timeframes.
• Conduct start-of-day and end-of-day operational activities, including readiness checks and monitoring processing outcomes.
• Maintain accurate exception logs, incident records, and supporting evidence, ensuring every open issue is documented with a clear status and actions.
• Provide comprehensive shift handovers covering outstanding exceptions, incidents, pending activities, and escalations.
• Assist in corporate actions processing, including event notifications, participant elections, response deadlines, and verification of entitlement distributions.
• Support repo and collateral management, such as settling opening and closing legs and monitoring margin calls.
• Help with participant account management, including opening, amendments, and closures while maintaining accurate records in line with approved controls.
• Produce holding statements and update instrument and participant registers following authorized events.
• Respond to participant enquiries, assisting with instruction submission queries, and coordinate with Product Technology to resolve connectivity issues.
• Log operational errors and near misses, support incident triage, and provide evidence for reviews and audits.
• Contribute to user acceptance testing, operational readiness exercises, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Work flexibly within a rotating shift pattern to ensure effective handovers and accurate processing across shifts.

What You'll Bring

• A bachelor’s degree in Finance, Business, Economics, or a related field.
• Minimum three years of experience in securities operations, settlement, custody, or financial markets operations.
• Practical experience monitoring securities settlement and managing operational exceptions.
• Experience in a multi-currency, multi-asset environment with time-critical settlement deadlines.
• Willingness to work a rotating shift pattern covering Sundays to Fridays.
• Advantageous experience in operations with extended or non-standard hours.
• Understanding of delivery-versus-payment (DvP) settlement, cash and securities reconciliation, and operational controls.
• Familiarity with operational cut-offs, shift rosters, and handover processes.
• Ability to utilize operational dashboards and processing systems for monitoring and issue investigation.
• Strong attention to detail and disciplined record keeping.
• Effective communication skills to interact with internal and external stakeholders.
• Good judgment in identifying issues, prioritizing work, and escalating when necessary.
• Composure and accuracy during high-activity and time-sensitive processing.
• Fluency in written and spoken English.

Desirable Experience
Candidates with the following experience would be particularly valuable:

• Working within a central securities depository (CSD), custody bank, or other financial markets organization.
• Experience in a regulated financial services environment.
• Exposure to multiple asset classes and currencies in settlement processes.
• Experience with corporate actions, repo settlement, and knowledge of sukuk and Shari'a-compliant structures.
• Familiarity with SWIFT MT5xx settlement messaging and ISO 20022 messages.
• Proficiency in Arabic, in addition to English.

Location and Terms
This role is based in Muscat, Oman. It is a permanent position for Omani nationals, while expatriate hires will be offered a two-year fixed-term contract. Omani nationals are strongly encouraged to apply.