Job Title: Head of Distribution Operations
Reports to: COO (direct); CGO (dotted line)
Location: Hyderabad
Level: Senior leadership — responsible for translating commercial targets into operational plans, cost discipline, governance, and analytics across all distribution channels.
Key Responsibilities
- Distribution planning: Own annual and quarterly distribution plans (business volumes, revenue, channel mix, cost budgets) and convert strategy into operational roadmaps.
- Plan vs delivery monitoring: Track performance vs plan; produce weekly/monthly variance analysis and corrective actions.
- Enablement: Design enablers (processes, SLAs, incentives, training, tools) to improve channel productivity and conversion.
- Cost management: Build and manage distribution cost budgets; identify optimization levers and ensure spend discipline.
- Governance: Establish distribution governance, approval workflows, controls and compliance checks.
- Team building: Recruit, structure and lead a Distribution Ops team (planning, MIS, analytics, channel ops).
- Cross‑functional liaison: Coordinate with Product, Underwriting, Claims, Finance, IT and Sales to align launches, commissions, MIS and operational dependencies.
- MIS & analytics: Deliver dashboards and analytics for channel performance, unit economics, acquisition cost, persistency and ROI.
- Continuous improvement: Drive automation, tool integrations and process standardization to scale operations.
- Reporting: Present distribution performance, forecasts and strategic recommendations to the executive team.
Success metrics (KPIs)
- Achievement vs distribution revenue/volume targets.
- Distribution cost ratio (cost per acquisition; cost as % of premium).
- Channel productivity (policies per FTE, conversion rates).
- MIS timeliness & data quality.
- Persistency and retention for distributed business.
- Governance scorecard (SLA adherence, compliance incidents).
Requirements
Experience & qualifications
- 10+ years in distribution, operations or commercial planning (insurance/insurtech/financial services); 5+ years in leadership preferred.
- Deep knowledge of insurance distribution channels (brokers, bancassurance, agency, digital, government/tenders).
- Education: Bachelor's degree; MBA or advanced degree preferred.
- Strong Excel modelling; experience with BI tools (Power BI/Tableau); familiarity with CRM/distribution platforms; SQL/Python is an advantage.
