Senior Associate – Investment Accounting Governance

Investment Operations | Fund Accounting | Custodian Oversight | Governance & Controls

Location : (Sydney OR Melbourne - Hybrid)

We are partnering with a leading Australian institutional investment organisation to appoint a Senior Associate into a newly developing investment accounting governance capability. This is not a traditional fund accounting role, and it is not simply a custodian relationship-management position. The opportunity sits between investment accounting, operations, governance, data and outsourced service-provider oversight.

At its core, the role exists to answer an important question:

How does an asset owner independently know that the portfolio accounting performed by its outsourced custodian is accurate, controlled, explainable and operating as intended?

The successful person will help build the framework that answers that question.

WHAT YOU WILL ACHIEVE

Over your first 12 months, you will help take a developing governance capability and turn it into a clear, measurable and sustainable operating model.

You will get to

- Map how investment activity, accounting instructions, valuations, fees and other inputs flow through the custodian and into the accounting book of record.
- Identify where instructions, data, ownership or controls can fail and determine what better governance should look like.
- Help design the end-to-end framework for accounting-instruction governance, including ownership, validation, version control and evidence.
- Establish a structured approach to cash and accounting breaks, including classification, root-cause analysis, SLAs, escalation pathways and resolution ownership.
- Work directly with the custodian to create clearer expectations, stronger accountability and more effective ways of working.
- Make provider performance visible through meaningful KPIs, incident trends, ageing, recurrence, root cause and remediation reporting.
- Strengthen controls around portfolio-accounting data including valuations, fees, expenses and fund structures.
- Build processes that are sustainable, well documented and capable of standing up to audit and regulatory scrutiny.
- Help develop workflow, validation, reporting and automation that reduces manual intervention and makes issues easier to identify and manage.
- Work across Investment Operations, Finance, Risk, Compliance, investment teams, external managers and service providers to establish common standards and ownership.

The goal is not to become the person who manually fixes every accounting issue. It is to build the governance system that determines how issues are identified, challenged, owned, escalated, resolved and prevented from recurring.

THE CHALLENGE

There will already be accounting processes, controls,



provider relationships and experienced people around you.

The challenge is to step above the individual process and ask:

- Is this the right control?
- Who should own it?
- What evidence should exist?
- What should the custodian be accountable for?
- When should an issue be escalated?
- What does repeated failure tell us about the operating model?
- What information does management need in order to make a decision?
- How do we build something that works without relying on individual knowledge and manual follow-up?

That requires someone who is comfortable moving between the detail of a reconciliation and the design and execution of the governance framework around it. The backgrounds we think could work well

There is no single career path into this role.

You may currently be working within:

- a superannuation fund or other institutional asset owner;
- an investment or asset manager;
- investment accounting or fund operations;
- a custodian or fund administrator;
- portfolio control or investment control;
- service-provider or custody oversight;
- asset and wealth management assurance or advisory; or
- a related controls, governance or finance-transformation environment.
- a Big 4 or top tier firm in audit and advisory into investments, asset management, superannuation

What matters more than your current title is the capability you have built. The skills that matter most

You should have a strong enough grounding in investment or fund accounting to understand what sits underneath the numbers.

That may include experience with areas such as:

- NAV and unit pricing;
- portfolio accounting;
- cash and position reconciliations;
- fees and expenses;
- valuations;
- distributions;
- investment structures;
- accounting breaks and exception management;
- fund administration or custody; and
- investment operations or middle-office processes.

From there, we are particularly interested in people who have started moving beyond the production of the accounting itself.

You have material capability

- challenged a custodian, administrator or other service provider when an accounting treatment or output did not make sense;
- investigated recurring problems and moved beyond fixing the individual break to addressing the underlying cause;
- designed or materially improved a control, governance process or operating procedure;
- built SLAs, escalation pathways,



ownership frameworks or service standards;
- helped establish governance reporting, dashboards or management information;
- translated policy, regulation or contractual requirements into practical controls;
- improved workflows through Excel, Power BI, Power Automate or other technology; or
- helped create a new process where there was not already a mature playbook.

You do not need to have done every one of these things. We are interested in the trajectory of your experience and the way you think about problems, not simply whether your CV contains every keyword.

A professional accounting or finance qualification such as CA, CPA or equivalent, together with meaningful experience across investment accounting, unit pricing, fund operations or related financial services environments, will provide a strong foundation.

The person this will suit

This role will appeal to someone who enjoys asking why.

Someone who is technically credible enough to go into the detail, but whose instinct is increasingly to understand the broader system around the problem.

You might currently be the person others call when:

- a reconciliation does not make sense;
- the custodian's explanation does not quite answer the question;
- the accounting treatment needs to be challenged;
- several teams disagree about ownership;
- the same problem keeps recurring;
- a process needs to be redesigned; or
- someone needs to turn a complex technical issue into a clear decision.

You will need to be comfortable influencing people without relying on hierarchy, working through ambiguity and building structure where the answer is not already written down. WHY THIS ROLE WHY NOW?

For the right person, this is an opportunity to move beyond simply producing, reviewing or reconciling accounting outputs. You will get to help shape how a major institutional investor governs its outsourced portfolio-accounting environment. That means working across technical accounting, controls, data, service-provider governance and operating-model design while remaining close enough to the detail to understand what is really happening.

It should suit someone who wants their next move to involve more ownership, more judgement and more opportunity to build.

INTERESTED?

If the role feels directionally aligned with your experience and the problems sound compelling, we would like to hear from you.

You do not need to have already performed every element of the mandate. This is an expression of interest rather than a checklist exercise. The next step in the process is a detailed conversation about your experience, where your strongest capability sits, the areas you have already built and the areas you would be stepping into next.

📌 Senior Associate – Investment Accounting Governance (Melbourne)
🏢 Profusion
📍 Melbourne