Background

Charles Taylor is a leading global provider of professional services and technology solutions to the insurance industry.  We are a profitable, growing organisation that is highly regarded in the insurance industry, employing some of the industry’s ‘best in class’ professionals and technical experts.  Our services and solutions support every stage of the insurance lifecycle and every aspect of the insurance operating model, across all major commercial insurance lines as well as technical areas of personal insurance. We serve a diversified blue-chip international customer base that includes national and international insurance companies, mutuals, captives, MGAs, Lloyd's syndicates and reinsurers, along with brokers, distributors and corporate insureds.

Charles Taylor is PE-backed, following a majority investment by Lovell Minnick Partners in January 2020, and has strong ambitions for organic and acquisition-led growth.

Our delivery of high quality, tailored services and solutions to our clients is backed by our core values of support, excellence in people, client partnership, quality of work, entrepreneurship and positive change.   We look for employees who exemplify these values to join us and help drive our growth.

For more information, please visit www.charlestaylor.com

The Role

We are seeking an experienced IT Application Support Manager to lead the delivery and evolution of our IT application support services with a product ownership mindset. This hybrid role combines strategic ownership of the IT Application Support Service with the operational responsibility of managing a third-party application support partner, ensuring high-quality service delivery aligned with business needs.

Key Responsibilities

🔧 Operational Leadership

• Manage the relationship with a third-party outsourced application support provider, ensuring contractual obligations, SLAs, and KPIs are consistently met or exceeded.
• Act as the primary escalation point for service issues, driving resolution and continuous improvement in collaboration with the vendor.
• Monitor service performance, user satisfaction, and incident trends to identify and drive areas for improvement and innovation.
• Ensure seamless integration between internal teams and the external support partner to deliver a cohesive support experience.

🧠 Product Ownership

• Own the IT Application Support Service as a product, including its roadmap, backlog, and lifecycle.
• Gather and prioritize user feedback, pain points, and enhancement requests to shape service evolution.
• Define and communicate the vision for IT support services, ensuring alignment with business goals and user expectations.

📈 Strategic Planning & Innovation

• Identify opportunities to enhance support services through automation, self-service, and emerging technologies.
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders and the support partner to implement service improvements and new capabilities.
• Align support services with broader IT and digital transformation strategies.

🤝 Stakeholder Engagement

• Serve as the voice of the user within the IT organization, advocating for service quality and usability.
• Provide regular updates to leadership on service performance, roadmap progress, and key initiatives.
• Foster strong relationships with business units, ensuring support services meet evolving needs.

Required Skills

Essential

• Proven experience managing third-party IT service providers or outsourced support functions.
• Strong understanding of ITIL practices and service management frameworks.
• Experience of working with the product team and demonstrate understanding of product ownership.
• Excellent communication, vendor management, and stakeholder engagement skills.

Desirable

• Experience with Agile or DevOps methodologies.
• Familiarity with service management tools (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira Service Management).
• Knowledge of application support models and enterprise IT environments.

Why This Role is Unique

This is a strategic opportunity to own and evolve Core IT services while managing a key external partner. You'll shape the future of IT support delivery with a focus on user experience, innovation, and measurable outcomes.

Values

Our values define who we are, what we stand for and how we behave. They guide how we work with our colleagues and our clients, today and in the future. By living our values every day when we come to work, we deliver better results for the world of insurance.  

Demonstrate and role model the Charles Taylor five Values by acting with responsibility and respect (Integrity), work better together (Collaboration), anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to change (Agility), are compassionate and human (Care) and take ownership (Accountability).  

Why join Charles Taylor?

We are very proud of the fact that nine out of ten of our people recommend Charles Taylor as a place to work.  We pride ourselves on having a positive work environment where our people are empowered to make the best decisions and where learning is valued highly and shared across our business.

We are very committed to ensuring our people are given continuous learning and development. As well as structured induction programmes and job training, we provide study support for relevant professional qualifications and have a Core Learning & Development Curriculum.

Contact information

Ankur Chowdhury