Senior HR Operations Manager

MoneySmart is Southeast Asia’s leading personal finance platform, helping consumers across Singapore and Hong Kong find the right financial products and make smarter decisions with their money. We’re at an inflection point: moving from a comparison platform to a genuinely personalised financial companion.  

Mission

The Senior HR Operations Manager owns and runs HR Operations across Singapore and Hong Kong. This means the systems, processes and data that carry every employee through their lifecycle, from offer and onboarding through changes, payroll and benefits to offboarding are run accurately, compliantly and with minimal friction. The role is accountable for an operation that supports employees and the company in a way that creates great outcomes for both.

The direction for HR operations is the same as the rest of MoneySmart: data-informed, AI-native, and ruthlessly efficient operations that meet business needs. Agility, focus, decisiveness and expertise are tools that will help us make the transition but most important is the ability to pick up new skills and try new ways of working to break the entrenched patterns of how HR has been run in the past. The role reports to the Head of People, who holds ultimate responsibility over the People Team at MoneySmart and determines what authority is delegated to the Senior HR Operations Manager.

Responsibilities

• Run core HR processes across all employment markets as one operation. One documented set of processes covers payroll, benefits, records and the recurring pay, performance and development cycles. Harmonised wherever possible, most importantly compliant, robust and reliable. A single failure in payroll, work-visa authorisation or regulatory submissions is one too many
• An employee journey that feels personalised. Manage the whole employee lifecycle. Onboarding, tool enablement, performance reviews, learning and development confirmations, changes, transfers and offboarding run smoothly end-to-end. Create and manage intervention points to improve desired retention, to improve performance and to have the biggest impact at scale
• Bring the culture to life. Take the lead in putting intent into practice and bringing our target culture into reality. Cultivate a strong understanding and adoption of intended culture and MoneySmart's values and mission. Ensure culture adoption is embedded into how HR operates, and culture-positive employees are celebrated and the importance of culture is seen
• Compensation and benefits are a win-win outcome. Work with the Head of People to design and manage compelling compensation and benefit structures that attract and motivate talent, create fair reward for performance and are suitably benchmarked, both internally and externally. Compensation changes, benefits and rewards are administered correctly and on schedule across both markets, with robust controls
• Innovate and experiment to drive improvement. Explore and test new ways of working, new tools and especially AI-capabilities to transform people operations to provide better, more meaningful service to employees and leadership
• Create valuable employee data and extract maximum value. The HRIS is the single source of truth: clean, structured and reportable. Manager and employee self-service puts accurate answers at people's fingertips and cuts routine queries. Data breadth, automated collection and quality controls are continually improved. Claims relating to government-subsidised benefits are managed efficiently, like maternity or national service leave
• Coach and advise line managers to make them more impactful. Beyond ensuring consistent application of agreed HR practices, you would identify gaps and opportunities to build manager capability so they handle these situations correctly, confidently and increasingly independent. This is particularly true for sensitive matters such as performance management (performance improvement plans), investigations and disciplinary processes

Skills, Traits and Competencies

• Operational rigour and accuracy. Treats getting the details right as non-negotiable, because in HR Ops errors land directly on people's pay, status and trust, and on the company's compliance position. Builds the controls and checks that make accuracy systematic rather than heroic
• Great organisation and decision making: Excels at identifying priorities and working accordingly. Can see problems coming ahead of time rather than focussing just on the next step. Knows when to act to relieve the pressure when risks are building. Risk management means more than just complying with regulation
• Stakeholder influence: Capable of building credible, trust-based relationships with individual contributors, line managers and senior leaders. Hold credibility with discussing HR matters, and adapts communication style without losing authority. 
• Data fluency: Comfortable building, interrogating and communicating HR data. Knows which numbers matter for what purpose. Can translate metrics into business language without losing accuracy. Can use data to make decisions and to influence others. Can understand and interpret the data, not just report it 
• Systems thinking: Builds structure around ambiguity. Documents what works, improves what does not, and creates repeatable processes that scale. Makes deliberate decisions about tools and productivity rather than defaulting to established habits. Capable of identifying the crux of the matter by looking past the noise 
• SEA market knowledge: Has a working understanding of HR operations and best practices across Singapore, Hong Kong and broader SEA, particularly in fintech and technology. Understand importance risks factors in each market and how to manage / mitigate them.
• Technology-first: Uses technology, including AI, to solve problems as the first option, not last resort 

Requirements

• 8+ years in People/HR operations or an operations-heavy HR role, ideally in technology, fintech or high-growth environments 
• Experience operating across Singapore and Hong Kong, with other South East Asia markets a welcome differentiator 
• Has personally owned payroll and statutory compliance in Singapore (CPF, IRAS, MOM) and Hong Kong (MPF, IRD, Immigration) — not only overseen a team that does it 
• Deep, current working knowledge of the Singapore Employment Act / TAFEP / PDPA and the Hong Kong Employment Ordinance / PDPO 
• Hands-on experience owning an HRIS and improving HR processes through standardisation and automation, with clear examples of what was built and what it produced 
• Experience managing HR vendors (payroll, benefits, HRIS, employers-of-record) across markets, and handling government grants and claims 
• Track record handling sensitive matters (e.g. investigations, disciplinary, terminations) correctly and defensibly 
• Has people management experience 
• Comfortable building and improving HR reporting and analytics, not just consuming it 

MoneySmart Culture Values & Tenets

The traits we admire are core intrinsic qualities we look for in someone we want on our team, and we look for people who are Hungry, Humble and Smart. We also expect all our people to uphold the following company values:

• Play to win as a team
• Solve for the customer
• Embrace a personal growth mindset
• Step up and own it
• Challenge the status quo and deliver outcomes

MoneySmart Group is an equal opportunity employer. Please include only relevant details and avoid unnecessary information (e.g., photos, age) in your job application to assist us in ensuring that the interview process is devoid of bias.