Director of Suitability Operations and Conservation

Overview

Responsible for the strategic leadership, governance, and execution of the Suitability Review and Annuity Conservation functions. This role owns the design, performance, and compliance integrity of suitability and conservation programs, ensuring customer outcomes align with regulatory expectations and company risk standards. Provides leadership for all employees supporting suitability review and retention efforts, establishes operational strategy and performance standards, and drives continuous improvement across people, processes, systems, and vendor partnerships.

Partners with Compliance, Legal, Sales, New Business, Customer Experience, and Executive Leadership to ensure suitability and conservation practices are consistent, defensible, scalable, and aligned with business growth objectives.

Executive Leadership & Personnel Management

• Leads and develops managers and teams responsible for suitability review and conservation outcomes.
• Works with HR and leadership to recruit, hire, and retain high-performing teams, including succession planning and leadership development.
• Establishes performance expectations tied to compliance quality, customer outcomes, service levels, and persistency results.
• Creates a culture of accountability, strong documentation discipline, and operational excellence.
• Provides leadership for employee relations through proactive communication, goal setting, training, performance management, and issue resolution.

• Owns the enterprise strategy for suitability operations and conservation, aligning department goals with business objectives, product strategy, and regulatory expectations.
• Develops, maintains, and enforces suitability and conservation policies, procedures, and internal controls to support audit readiness and market conduct defensibility.
• Partners with Compliance and Legal to ensure suitability decision frameworks, documentation standards, and escalation protocols meet current regulatory and company requirements.
• Leads preparation for and response to internal audits, external examinations, regulator inquiries, and formal complaint investigations related to suitability or conservation.

• Establishes and monitors service standards for suitability turnaround time, case resolution, and conservation outreach performance.
• Oversees end-to-end suitability operations including intake, risk identification, documentation validation, escalation handling, approval/decline decision support, and file integrity standards.
• Oversees conservation strategy and execution including retention outreach, case handling, trend analysis, root-cause identification, and strategy effectiveness.
• Drives operational improvements through process redesign, automation opportunities, workload balancing, and streamlined case handling.
• Oversees vendor relationships and service performance where applicable, ensuring measurable outcomes, quality controls, and cost effectiveness.

• Establishes and leads a suitability and conservation quality program, including audit sampling, error trend reporting, coaching feedback loops, and corrective action plans.
• Ensures suitability determinations and conservation activity are documented clearly, consistently, and defensibly.
• Identifies operational and compliance risks, escalates emerging issues, and leads resolution plans in partnership with key stakeholders.
• Uses data to identify trends such as replacement patterns, early lapse/free-look activity, complaint drivers, and high-risk sales behaviors.

• Defines key metrics and reporting standards for suitability and conservation performance.
• Builds and maintains dashboards that track production, turnaround time, quality, outcomes, and risk indicators.
• Provides executive-level reporting and recommendations to leadership on trends, risks, and operational capacity.
• Uses analytics to support staffing models, workload forecasts, training needs, and process improvement prioritization.

• Serves as a primary operational leader and subject matter expert for suitability and conservation practices.
• Drives alignment across internal teams and distribution partners to ensure consistent expectations, communication, and execution.
• Oversees communication between staff and sales agents/IMOs regarding case status, documentation requirements, suitability outcomes, and conservation activities.
• Communicates clearly and frequently to keep employees informed and ensure consistent adoption of changes.

Required:

• Knowledge of multiple operational functions with demonstrated leadership in regulated insurance or financial services environments.
• Minimum of 5 years' experience building and leading teams and managers; ability to hire, develop, motivate and organize resources to build a highly engaged and high performing team.
• Strong working knowledge of data analysis…