Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
About Horizontal: Established since 2003 in the US, Horizontal solves complex challenges across two distinct businesses: Horizontal Digital and Horizontal Talent. We are consistently recognized for being a top workplace and one of the fastest growing private companies. Horizontal Talent specializes in staffing for IT, Digital & Creative and Business & Strategy markets. We have global offices in US, UAE, India, Malaysia and Australia.
Position Overview: The Senior Group Enterprise Architect – Insurance (Life & General) plays a strategic role in defining and maintaining the target architecture that supports the Bank’s insurance subsidiaries and distribution businesses.
As part of the Group Enterprise Architecture team, this role helps shape the technology landscape to remain modern, compliant, resilient, and future-ready. The role acts as a trusted advisor and strategic partner to business and technology leaders, providing architecture recommendations that support insurance transformation decisions.
With a strong focus on Life Insurance, General Insurance, Health Insurance, and Bancassurance distribution, the Insurance Enterprise Architect ensures that business architecture evolves in line with regulatory changes, customer expectations, and industry modernization trends.
The role serves as a bridge between business and technology, ensuring insurance modernization initiatives are aligned with enterprise architecture standards, regulatory obligations, and strategic transformation programs.
Responsibilities
Strategic Business Architecture Development
- Define and maintain the Insurance (Life & General) current-state and target-state business architecture aligned with ACORD and BIAN service domains.
- Identify opportunities to align business and IT strategy to improve underwriting accuracy, claims efficiency, operational resilience, customer experience, and bancassurance conversion.
- Develop and support Target Operating Model initiatives across Life Insurance, General Insurance, Bancassurance, and Health Insurance domains.
Insurance Capability Architecture Leadership
- Own the Insurance target-state architecture and lead stakeholder discussions to align architecture roadmaps.
- Translate insurance business capabilities including product, pricing, underwriting, policy administration, claims, reinsurance, distribution, customer servicing, and fraud management into architectural designs.
- Maintain architecture roadmaps, capability heat maps, and application rationalisation initiatives for the insurance domain.
- Communicate insurance architecture strategies and plans across business and technology stakeholders.
Governance and Standards Compliance
- Ensure insurance architecture initiatives comply with regulatory and actuarial requirements including BNM, OJK, MAS, and IFRS 17.
- Ensure alignment with enterprise-wide architecture standards, principles, and governance processes.
- Govern the implementation of insurance domain standards and patterns across programs and projects.
Innovation and Research
- Identify opportunities to leverage next-generation insurance capabilities including AI-supported underwriting, digital claims, cloud-native Policy Administration Systems (PAS), modular APIs, and telematics/IoT where relevant.
- Monitor industry trends including embedded insurance, ecosystem partnerships, InsurTech, and parametric covers.
- Produce forward-looking research and impact assessments to support investment decisions.
Enterprise Architecture & Regulatory Alignment
- Apply enterprise architecture frameworks and standards including TOGAF 9.1/10, ACORD Reference Model, BIAN Service Landscape, and ArchiMate 3.
- Ensure alignment with regulatory expectations including:
- BNM RMiT (Malaysia)
- OJK MRTI (Indonesia)
- MAS requirements (Singapore)
- IFRS 17 insurance reporting standards
- Risk-Based Capital (RBC) and solvency requirements across ASEAN
- PDPA data privacy and customer data controls
Architecture Success Measures
- Develop and maintain the Insurance target-state architecture, acting as the trusted Enterprise Architect for business and technology leaders.
- Ensure digital initiatives align with Group strategy and architecture direction.
- Support delivery of insurance modernization initiatives against the target-state roadmap.
- Drive reduction of legacy insurance system footprint including PAS, claims, and CRM platforms through modernization initiatives.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Information Technology, or related discipline.
- Minimum 10 years of work experience with Enterprise Architecture.
- Minimum 5 years of work experience with TOGAF.
- Typically 15+ years of experience in enterprise or solution architecture.
- Minimum 5 years leading insurance architecture (Life and/or General) within financial services.
- Demonstrated experience in insurance transformation strategies, PAS/claims modernization, or regulatory-driven change programs.
- Strong experience in insurance core system modernization including policy administration systems, claims, distribution, and CRM platforms.
- Strong analytical and strategic thinking capabilities with the ability to translate complex insurance challenges into clear architectural strategies.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to articulate complex architectural concepts to executive audiences.
- Strong stakeholder management and collaboration skills.
Preferred
- Master’s degree or professional chartered qualifications in Insurance, Banking, Finance, or Markets.
- Professional qualifications such as ACII, FLMI, CFA, CA, or CB.
- TOGAF and ACORD certifications.
- Experience working with insurance core platforms across Life and General Insurance.
- Deep understanding of ASEAN insurance trends including digital insurance, InsurTech, embedded insurance, and regulatory-driven transformation.
- Experience engaging with CxO and senior executive stakeholders on architecture strategy and transformation initiatives.
The above description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.
