UAT Manager Core Banking

Responsibilities: - Develop and manage end-to-end User Acceptance Testing (UAT) plans across multiple APAC markets, aligned with core banking release schedules. - Define UAT scope, user roles, test coverage, and market-specific business scenarios for corporate banking products, including Lending, Trade Finance, Payments, and Treasury. - Coordinate with country UAT leads, business users, and operations teams to assess readiness and consolidate UAT requirements across APAC branches. - Facilitate alignment of test scenarios, resource allocation, user access provisioning, and execution plans across markets. - Support the development and review of test cases, business scenarios, and expected results to ensure completeness, accuracy, and cross-market consistency. - Oversee daily UAT execution activities, including test progress tracking, defect management, retesting, and sign-off readiness. - Lead UAT war-room sessions and act as the primary liaison between business users, IT teams, and PMO stakeholders. - Identify, monitor, and escalate testing risks, dependencies, environment issues, and execution challenges in a timely manner. - Coordinate defect triage and resolution activities, ensuring proper logging, prioritization, validation, and closure of issues. - Prepare and maintain UAT dashboards, status reports, defect metrics, and testing readiness assessments for stakeholders and senior management. - Develop governance and steering committee materials, highlighting key risks, issues, project progress, and mitigation plans. - Partner with business and operations teams to assess change impacts, support user readiness activities, and ensure successful cutover preparation. Requirements: - Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Technology, Finance, Accounting, or a related discipline. - Minimum 3 years of experience in a top-tier consulting firm or leading consulting practice, delivering banking industry projects and large-scale transformation initiatives. - Business-level proficiency in English with strong verbal, written, and presentation skills. - Excellent stakeholder management and collaboration skills, with the ability to engage effectively across business, operations, technology, and project teams. - Proven ability to work successfully with geographically dispersed teams across APAC and global locations. - Strong sense of ownership, accountability, attention to detail, and commitment to delivering high-quality outcomes. - Experience with core banking platforms such as Oracle FLEXCUBE, Finastra GPP, ACBS, Murex, Trade360, or similar banking systems. - Proven track record in banking IT delivery and coordinating UAT activities within multi-country and complex program environments. - Significant experience leading and coordinating UAT stakeholders, including Business Users, Operations Teams, IT Teams, Vendors, and System Integration (SI) Partners. - End-to-end UAT lifecycle management experience, including UAT strategy and approach definition, scope and test coverage planning, entry and exit criteria management, test environment and data readiness coordination, business sign-off management and audit-ready documentation. - Strong understanding of test scenario design, business process validation, and user acceptance testing methodologies. - Demonstrated capability in stakeholder communication, progress tracking, issue management, risk management, and escalation handling. - Advanced documentation and reporting skills, including proficiency in Excel, PowerPoint, dashboarding, and project reporting tools. - Knowledge of corporate banking products (e.g., Lending, Trade Finance, Payments, Treasury, and Deposits) would be advantageous. - Experience working with Japanese banks or financial institutions would be advantageous. - Proficiency in Japanese would be an advantage.