Head of Risk & Governance

At National Foods Limited, we are on a journey of growth and on building our most valuable assets which include our brands, financial strength, global presence, and our unbridled commitment to becoming a truly sustainable and a renowned company in the world.

Job Purpose:

To design, build and embed an enterprise risk management and governance capability that gives the Board and executive management a clear, current and challenged view of the risks to the Company’s strategic objectives, and a policy estate that is centrally governed, internally consistent, demonstrably linked to those risks, and owned and adhered to at function level. The incumbent is accountable for constructing both halves of the function from a nascent state to a defined and operating capability within twenty-four months, working personally and hands-on throughout.

Job Responsibilities:

• Design and secure Board approval for the enterprise risk management framework, taxonomy, methodology, escalation thresholds and reporting cadence, and the risk appetite and tolerance statement; thereafter maintain them.
• Define and document the boundaries between the second and third lines of defence, jointly with the Head of Internal Audit, for Board Audit Committee approval.
• Design and secure Board approval for the Policy Governance Framework - hierarchy, mandatory template, drafting standard, approval routing, review cycles, repository rules, attestation and exception process.
• Complete and maintain a full inventory of the policy estate, identify expired and expiring instruments, and drive closure of the urgent-action list.
• Challenge business cases constructively, recording dissent where warranted, the culture around the role must protect this rather than smooth it over.
• Operate the mandatory concordance review, ensuring no policy reaches its approving authority without a documented check against the existing estate for contradiction, overlap or inconsistent definitions.
• Own the policy library as process owner - metadata standards, review calendar, acknowledgement tracking, version control and retirement.
• Maintain the policy-to-risk coverage map, run the annual attestation cycle, and maintain the exception and waiver register, reporting governance health by function to the Management Risk Committee.
• Facilitate top-down enterprise risk identification with ManCom, producing a principal risk register with named owners, assessed gross and residual positions, and mitigation plans with milestones; build and reconcile bottom-up registers across every function and site.
• Define and instrument key risk indicators with thresholds, and produce a quarterly risk dashboard for the Management Risk Committee and Audit Committee.
• Establish emerging risk scanning - with particular emphasis on geopolitical, trade, sanctions and country risk affecting international markets - and report on a defined cycle.
• Incorporate the regulatory obligations register and thematic findings from Compliance (code of conduct, whistleblowing, anti-bribery) as inputs into the enterprise risk register and reporting.
• Prepare the risk management content of the annual report and the Board's annual statement on the effectiveness of risk management and internal control.
• Report functionally to the Board Audit Committee, with direct access to the Committee Chair; act as Secretary to the Management Risk Committee, and prepare and present quarterly risk reporting to the Audit Committee and semi-annual reporting to the Board; escalate, without filtering, any risk assessed as exceeding approved tolerance, including where the risk owner disputes the assessment.  
• Coordinate and maintain the combined assurance map jointly with Internal Audit, identifying duplication and unassured exposures.
• Embed a formal risk assessment step into capital expenditure approvals, new market entry and international expansion decisions, and major contract and supplier commitments; provide risk input into the annual strategy and budget cycle and the Horizon 2030 planning and review process, expressed as threats to specific strategic objectives.
• Partner the International Division on country risk assessment, distributor and counterparty exposure, and sanctions/trade control screening for entry or exit decisions.
• Own the business continuity framework - test, train against, document readiness gaps, and uplift and scale it across all production sites, the distribution network and head office; establish the crisis management framework, team, escalation protocol and communication plan - including product recall and food safety incident scenarios - and run at least one live simulation per year.
• Own the methodology and tiering for third-party and supply chain risk; map the insurance programme against the enterprise risk register, identify coverage gaps, and advise Treasury on renewal strategy; develop scenario and stress-testing capability for the Company's top exposures.
• Establish, train and lead the Risk & Governance Champions network, and deliver risk awareness and capability sessions for ManCom, the Board, site leadership and functional teams, differentiated by audience.
• Set the common risk-assessment standard across domain-owned risks (food safety/quality, occupational health & safety, information/cyber security, people risk), aggregating them into a single enterprise view with consistent severity calibration for the Board, without duplicating the owning functions' own risk capabilities; build and lead a small, high-calibre internal team.

Preferred Qualification, Skills and Experience:

• 10 -15 years of experience, with a minimum of 5 -6 years in enterprise risk management or risk advisory
• Must have built or materially rebuilt an ERM framework at least once - not administered an inherited one; manufacturing, FMCG or multi-site industrial background, with genuine comfort in an operating environment; direct experience preparing for and presenting to a listed company Audit Committee or Board

Location:

Corporate Office, Karachi

National Foods Limited provides equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, origin, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, marital status, status with regard to public assistance or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.