Senior Associate, Finance & AI Ops

About Emerge Insurtech

Emerge is an AI-native insurance and reinsurance broker built around emerging risks, emerging leaders, and emerging Asia. We build the technology, the operations and the distribution that let insurance brands run digitally, across our own brands, Oyen (pet insurance), Foundation (property & engineering insurance), Contingent (SME insurance), Voyage (trade and freight insurance) and more.

Increasingly we build that with AI: automating what used to be manual, so the team spends its time on judgment calls instead of admin.

Why should you join us

• If you've been building things with AI tools and wondering when finance teams will catch up, we've caught up.
• If you want to own the numbers AND build the system that produces them.
• If you'd rather spend a week removing a task than a year repeating it.
• If you're tired of a month-end close that is the same manual work every month, forever.
• If you want to be part of a small team where your judgment carries weight from week one.
• If you're interested in disrupting a US$5 trillion industry and being at the heart of insurance going digital.
• If you enjoy a high-paced environment with some uncertainty but high opportunity, and freedom to experiment and learn from mistakes.
  

About the Role

This is not an AI role, and it is not a spreadsheet-maintenance role.

Most finance teams scale by adding headcount. We're building the opposite. Emerge is building the end-to-end financial journey for an insurance broking group, premium in, settlement out, reconciliation, management reporting, as an automated, agentic pipeline rather than a queue of manual tasks routed through an external accounting firm.

It is a senior finance role for someone who owns the numbers with full professional rigour and works hand-in-hand with the AI Ops team who build the automation. You bring the finance judgment: you design how a process should work, specify the logic, pressure-test what is built, and catch what is wrong before it ships. The engineer builds the machine; you are the reason it books the right entry.

But you have to own the process before you can automate it. Nothing goes live on your pillars without your validation, and you decide what stays manual.

How the team is set up

Emerge's finance function is deliberately small: the Finance Manager and you. This is an individual-contributor role with no direct reports but individual contributor here means you own whole processes end to end, not a slice of one.

You report directly to the Finance Manager, who heads the finance function and owns Reinsurance, holding-level P&L and group consolidation. You own D2C and B2B: the reconciliation, the policy-to-cash flow, pillar reporting, and the finance logic behind the automation. Auditors, regulators and tax agents are handled between the two of you - you front D2C and B2B, the Finance Manager covers group. You prepare and recommend; the Finance Manager signs off. In a team of two, that split is what keeps the review real.

As the pipeline matures, this role grows into full ownership of finance operations across D2C and B2B.

What you'll do

Emerge runs across three pillars: D2C (direct-to-consumer), B2B (broking for business clients), and Reinsurance. You own the finance work for D2C and B2B, these carry the volume, the reconciliation load, and the system-building. Reinsurance, holding-level P&L and group consolidation sit with the Finance Manager.

Own the money: reconciliation and settlement (50%)

• Own D2C payment-to-policy reconciliation: match every incoming payment to the correct policy across payment gateways, cards and bank channels, and resolve the breaks, unmatched receipts, refunds, chargebacks and timing differences all reconciled and aged. This is high-volume, high-frequency work, and the goal is to get it largely machine-matched so you review exceptions rather than every line.
• Own the outstandings / AR discipline for B2B: aged-debtor visibility, a systematic chasing workflow, and enforcement of credit terms with both clients and insurers.
• Own premium remittance to insurers: reconcile gross-to-net, and ensure every remittance lands inside the premium warranty window under BNM's broker conduct requirements. You own the ageing and alerting on remittance, keep it accurate, and act on what it flags.
• Own reconciliation against insurer statements of account, including the high-volume D2C book, and drive the matching towards automation.
• Handle cancellations, mid-term adjustments and endorsements end to end: return premium, refund routing, and brokerage clawback where it applies.
• Where a B2B placement is reinsured, own the client-side receivable and settlement. The reinsurance-side statement and remittance stays with the Finance Manager.

Build with AI Ops (30%)

• Act as the finance domain authority on the build: translate how each process should work into clear requirements the AI Ops team can implement, across the recon → payment → reporting journey, bank and card statement ingestion, receipt matching, premium remittance reconciliation, intercompany settlement, and management-report generation.
• Build the B2B policy-to-cash flow end to end with the AI Ops team: policy management → invoicing and payment → renewals → chasing outstandings → commission recovery. Define the finance logic at each stage: what triggers an invoice, how a renewal rolls, when an outstanding becomes overdue, how commission is recognised and recovered.
• Specify and validate the ingestion and reconciliation logic for multi-card, multi-platform spend and receipts across local bank and card platforms, so reconciliation is largely machine-driven, and review the exceptions the machine flags.
• Validate automated output before it is trusted: test edge cases, catch mis-bookings and reconciliation errors, and be accountable for whether an automated finance workflow is correct, even though you didn't write the code. Nothing goes live on your pillars without your validation.
• Shape the finance automation roadmap for D2C and B2B: map every recurring manual process, prioritise by effort saved and risk, and make the call on which are safe to automate.
• Know when NOT to automate. Define the human-in-the-loop checkpoints, the points where a person must approve before money moves, and know exactly when a machine should not be allowed near a client-account balance.
• Support the in-housing of bookkeeping onto the automated stack, entity by entity, without dropping a single compliance obligation.

Reporting, controls and compliance (20%)

• Produce timely, accurate management reporting for the D2C and B2B pillars, P&L, cash, and the KPIs that matter for each, feeding into the Finance Manager's group view.
• Maintain Insurance Broker Account (IBA) / Client Account integrity for your pillars, in line with the BNM Policy Document on Licensing and Regulatory Framework for Insurance Brokers.
• Define and maintain the class-of-business taxonomy, Fire, Marine, Motor, Liability, Miscellaneous, that internal product and class codes map into, so pillar reporting, commission analysis and regulatory submissions all cut the same way.
• Define the finance requirements for the data layer so pillar reporting and FP&A draw from a single source of truth rather than re-keyed spreadsheets.
• Implement and document financial controls, payment authorisation, expense policy, segregation of duties, premium remittance reconciliations, encoded into the automated workflows with a clean audit trail.
• Support annual statutory audit and regulatory submissions for the D2C and B2B entities.

What we're looking for

Must have

• MIA member, or ACCA / CA(M) / MICPA / CPA Australia qualified, with 5+ years post-qualification experience.
• At least 3 years in a finance role within insurance, takaful, broking or financial services. Direct insurance broking finance experienc, IBA, premium remittance, insurer settlement, is strongly preferred.
• Comfort operating within a multi-entity, multi-currency group.
• Strong Excel / Google Sheets. You should be able to build a reconciliation from scratch across multiple sources and currencies, and stress-test it.
• Experience with cloud accounting (Xero or QuickBooks).
• A demonstrated bias for automation. You have driven or closely partnered on taking a finance process from manual to automated — reconciliations, reporting, close, or data pipelines — and you can point to your contribution.
• Systems fluency and the ability to work with builders: comfortable specifying, testing and validating automated and AI-assisted workflows, and giving an engineer feedback they can act on.
• Excellent written English. You will draft management reports, board inputs, and regulatory submissions for your pillars.

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of SQL, Python, or low/no-code automation tools, enough to prototype, not necessarily to ship production code.
• Hands-on experience with AI/LLM-based tools applied to finance or operations.
• Familiarity with Malaysian e-Invoicing / MyInvois and indirect tax obligations.

The kind of person who thrives here

• You would rather spend a week removing a task than a year repeating it.
• You know when a process should be automated, when it needs a human checkpoint, and when it should stay manual, and you can defend each call.
• You do not need to be an engineer, but you think in systems and can give a builder feedback they can act on.
• You are willing to say a workflow is not ready, and to hold that line when there is pressure to ship.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity and figuring things out. You take ownership: if something's broken, you fix it or find someone who can.
• You see yourself as part of the team, not separate from it