Senior IT Business Analyst

Are you looking for a supportive, collaborative workplace with great teams and inspiring leaders? You've come to the right place. We're looking for ambitious people who share our values and want to make every day better for people around the world. If this sounds like you, and the career below sounds exciting, we'd like to hear from you. 

The Asia Delivery Services—MITDC team has the mandate to ensure we deliver business and IT initiatives that enable Manulife's regional strategic vision. We work across the different countries within the Asia region, partnering with country business units to develop business solutions that deliver value to our distributors and customers. We are involved in projects across multi-channel business and technology-based initiatives, and the work will accordingly involve extensive stakeholder management and collaboration across multiple functional teams. As part of this team, and as a business analyst, the incumbent plays a vital part in identifying user requirements and addressing the business issues raised by different stakeholders.

The Senior IT Business Analyst is responsible for eliciting the needs of stakeholders by investigating and clarifying their requests in order to determine underlying issues and causes. They act as the liaison between business and development teams for the purpose of aligning the designed and delivered solutions with the needs of stakeholders. Their activities include understanding enterprise problems and goals, analyzing needs and solutions, devising strategies, driving change, and facilitating stakeholder collaboration.

We are looking for someone with: 

• A degree, or equivalent, of Business Administration, Computer Science, Information Systems/Technology or related disciplines

• Minimum 5-7 years of solid business analysis experience in Financial Services (products, administration or distribution domain), ideally with specific Life Insurance or Wealth Management knowledge

• Experience in building digital products across multiple countries, preferably in a large multi-national corporation at a regional or global capacity

• Practical experience in both Agile and Waterfall delivery approaches

• Excellent analytical and creative problem-solving skills, strong communications at all business levels, with the ability to exercise flexibility and judgment in a dynamic environment 

• Excellent facilitation and influencing skills, including the ability to work effectively across a large organization and develop strong cross-functional relationships

• Excellent organization and high attention to detail, with the ability to adapt to a fast-paced environment and changing priorities

• Strong core business analysis competencies and interpersonal skills, with a constant drive for improvement

• Particular backgrounds in certain technologies depending on the project and role requirements

You will stand out if you have: 

• Experience in insurance distribution, operations or digital projects

• Experience creating gap analysis documents and/or business cases

• Strong people management skills, or recognized experience in leading teams of people

• Exposure to and understanding of Agile scrum methodologies and experience of working in an Agile team

• Exposure to Agile project management and content management tools such as JIRA and Confluence

• Strong PC skills including MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Microsoft Visio

• A background in software or test engineering

On the job you will: 

• Elicit and model business requirements/user stories; using appropriate analysis techniques, understand and describe the business needs in a structure and level of detail that is usable by the particular stakeholders.

• Deliver through Agile methodologies; through experience working with Agile tools (e.g. JIRA), participate in sprints and backlog grooming, and work with product owners for prioritization.

• Conduct business process re-engineering; using appropriate analysis techniques, understand and describe the as-is and to-be processes whilst analyzing the impact on people, processes, and systems.

• Validate requirements against business objectives; ensure that the requirements or designs deliver business value and directly support business objectives and goals, and ensure that we are using Human Centered Design principles to drive to this outcome.

• Define business solution options; identify, explore and describe the solution (not architectural or technical) options that would achieve the business need.

• Analyze potential value and recommend solutions; through a clear understanding of the business opportunity and objectives, assess the value that can be generated from the solution options and provide a recommendation to the key stakeholders.

• Focus on the customers; determine all requirements, solution designs and business value assessments from a customer perspective.

• Focus on quality; ensure all outputs are of a high quality and consistency, presented through the defined templates, models and frameworks of the team.

• Be involved in development; serve as an escalation point for requirement queries and clarifications from design, build, and testing teams.

• Assist in testing; review and assist the business and development teams in test strategy and acceptance criteria development and execution of in-sprint testing to ensure the solutions built meet business and product owner satisfaction (Definition of Done).

• Facilitate transition and change; assist in the identification of the transition journey from current to target state, and the change management activities/focus areas to enable successful adoption of solutions.

• Work collaboratively; multi-cultural, multi-location teams, and cross-functional working with teams from other business areas.

The Senior BA has the additional responsibility of being a subject matter expert in their fields of practice, and is expected to be capable of leading teams and mentoring associate or intermediate BAs, as well as contributing to the improvement of the wider BA community of practice.

• Act as a lead in your team of business analysts; when working on a business opportunity or project to ensure high quality outcomes are achieved within the required timeframes;

  • Identification of key streams of activity

  • Allocation of activities across the BA team

  • Provision of guidance and support to the team in terms of task execution

  • Close working with the project manager to support project delivery and planning

• Provide added value to the business;

  • Be a subject matter expert for a specific business area or business capability

  • Use domain knowledge to provide consultancy on feasibility of and/or risks to project plans, solutions and implementations

  • Proactively challenge the business approach, solution design or value focus to ensure the best Minimum Marketable Product (MMP) is achieved

  • Contribute to change management design and delivery

  • Identify opportunities to enhance transformation capabilities in country businesses

• Identify new ways of working;

  • New methods, tools or approaches for business analysis

  • Bring external insights into the team from other insurance players or industries

  • Suggest and implement best practices applicable to the situation

• Enhance team maturity;

  • Drive consistency and standardization in all work and outputs

  • Identify opportunities to improve working practices and relationships with other teams

  • Increase the team brand and act as an ambassador for the department

• Contribute to the Business Analysis community;

  • Lead or assist with initiatives that would benefit the community as a whole

  • Encourage increased engagement within and outside of the community

  • Actively coach and mentor, and share skills learning and knowledge with juniors

Work Arrangement: Hybrid

When you join our team:

• We'll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.

• We'll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.

• As part of our global team, we'll support you in shaping the future you want to see.

About Manulife and John Hancock

Manulife Financial Corporation is a leading international financial services provider, helping people make their decisions easier and lives better. To learn more about us, visit

Manulife is an Equal Opportunity Employer

At Manulife/John Hancock, we embrace our diversity. We strive to attract, develop and retain a workforce that is as diverse as the customers we serve and to foster an inclusive work environment that embraces the strength of cultures and individuals. We are committed to fair recruitment, retention, advancement and compensation, and we administer all of our practices and programs without discrimination on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, creed, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), sexual orientation, genetic characteristics, veteran status, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, disability, or any other ground protected by applicable law.

It is our priority to remove barriers to provide equal access to employment. A Human Resources representative will work with applicants who request a reasonable accommodation during the application process. All information shared during the accommodation request process will be stored and used in a manner that is consistent with applicable laws and Manulife/John Hancock policies. To request a reasonable accommodation in the application process, contact

Working Arrangement