Interim Chief Operating Officer — Retail Banking Control Recovery

The mandate

A high-volume reconciliation break remained unresolved across three reporting cycles and contributed to delayed customer refunds, leading the board to remove the operations chief. Although daily processing is stable, aged exceptions, complaint backlogs and fragmented service ownership now threaten a wider conduct issue.

The interim will join within fifteen days and serve for eleven months, including the year-end volume peak. A permanent COO search starts after the first ninety-day control review; a six-week overlap is intended, with limited extension authority if fit-and-proper clearance delays the appointment.

Handover is complete when daily reconciliations close within policy for sixty consecutive days, the material exception stock is below tolerance, refund and complaint service levels are independently sampled, and two disaster-recovery exercises pass without manual workarounds. The incoming COO must sign acceptance of the operating-control book.

Within policy, the interim may change processing cut-offs, redistribute workloads, pause weak outsourcing arrangements and deploy the ₹20 crore remediation reserve. Board consent is required for site closure, supplier termination above ₹30 crore total value, permanent headcount changes exceeding 5% and any customer redress programme above ₹50 crore.

Branch sales productivity, credit underwriting strategy and the core-banking replacement roadmap do not belong to this brief. The interim may surface dependencies but will not assume ownership of those executive agendas or of litigation arising from historic complaints.

Why this seat is open

The control failure revealed that nominal process ownership was not matched by end-to-end accountability. Promoting an internal operations head would preserve the same disputed boundaries during remediation. The board is using an interim window to impose hard control evidence before selecting a long-term operator.

What you will own

• Decide the daily control tower's exception priorities using customer harm, value at risk, ageing and regulatory consequence.
• Reconstruct end-to-end ownership for payments, deposits, refunds and complaints and obtain signed service maps from every control lead.
• Close the reconciliation backlog through evidenced root-cause cohorts rather than temporary write-offs or untracked manual adjustments.
• Approve revised operating cut-offs, capacity triggers and peak-volume contingencies for the national processing network.
• Renegotiate deficient outsource-service remedies and prepare board cases for any termination that exceeds delegated commercial authority.
• Certify two recovery exercises covering people, premises, technology dependency and customer communication under realistic outage conditions.
• Hand over a controlled operations calendar, validated key controls, supplier exposures, talent slate and unresolved conduct decisions.

Candidate qualifications

• Served as COO or national operations director for a regulated bank with multi-site transaction and customer-service accountability.
• Recovered a material reconciliation, refund or complaint failure under board and regulatory scrutiny.
• Directed workforces exceeding 2,000 people across captive and outsourced operations with measurable control outcomes.
• Negotiated banking operations contracts and invoked remedies without disrupting critical customer services.
• Designed evidence-led operational resilience exercises spanning technology, people, facilities and third parties.
• Can demonstrate disciplined succession transfer after an urgent operating intervention.

Non-negotiables

• Available for a Chennai-based executive schedule within fifteen days, including peak-period weekends when required.
• Has no unresolved conduct finding linked to customer redress, suspense accounting or outsourced operations.
• Will preserve independent Compliance and Risk challenge over closure evidence.
• Must have held direct line authority; advisory-only transformation experience is insufficient.

1. 49 words maximum. Confirm your notice position and earliest date for full-time Chennai presence.
2. 49 words maximum. Which aged-exception backlog have you personally cleared, and what evidence showed the underlying control was fixed?
3. 49 words maximum. Describe a recovery exercise you stopped because the scenario or evidence was not credible.