Head of Distribution Operations

Job Title: Head of Distribution Operations Reports to: COO (direct); CGO (dotted line) Location: Hyderabad Level: Senior leadership — responsible for translating commercial targets into operational plans, cost discipline, governance, and analytics across all distribution channels.

Key responsibilities

Own annual and quarterly distribution plans (business volumes, revenue, channel mix, cost budgets) and convert strategy into operational roadmaps. Plan vs delivery monitoring: Track performance vs plan; produce weekly/monthly variance analysis and corrective actions. Enablement: Design enablers (processes, SLAs, incentives, training, tools) to improve channel productivity and conversion.

Cost management: Build and manage distribution cost budgets; identify optimization levers and ensure spend discipline. Governance: Establish distribution governance, approval workflows, controls and compliance checks. Team building: Recruit, structure and lead a Distribution Ops team (planning, MIS, analytics, channel ops).

Cross‑functional liaison: Coordinate with Product, Underwriting, Claims, Finance, IT and Sales to align launches, commissions, MIS and operational dependencies. MIS & analytics: Deliver dashboards and analytics for channel performance, unit economics, acquisition cost, persistency and ROI. Continuous improvement: Drive automation, tool integrations and process standardization to scale operations.

Reporting: Present distribution performance, forecasts and strategic recommendations to the executive team. Success metrics (KPIs) Achievement vs distribution revenue/volume targets. Distribution cost ratio (cost per acquisition; cost as % of premium). Channel productivity (policies per FTE, conversion rates). MIS timeliness & data quality.

Persistency and retention for distributed business. Governance scorecard (SLA adherence, compliance incidents).

Requirements

Experience & qualifications 10+ years in distribution, operations or commercial planning (insurance/insurtech/financial services); 5+ years in leadership preferred. Deep knowledge of insurance distribution channels (brokers, bancassurance, agency, digital, government/tenders).

Education

Bachelor’s degree; MBA or advanced degree preferred. Strong Excel modelling; experience with BI tools (Power BI/Tableau); familiarity with CRM/distribution platforms; SQL/Python is an advantage.