AVP, CXO Strategy & Transformation

You are as unique as your background, experience and point of view. Here, you’ll be encouraged, empowered and challenged to be your best self. You'll work with dynamic colleagues - experts in their fields - who are eager to share their knowledge with you. Your leaders will inspire and help you reach your potential and soar to new heights. Every day, you'll have new and exciting opportunities to make life brighter for our Clients - who are at the heart of everything we do. Discover how you can make a difference in the lives of individuals, families and communities around the world.

Job Description:

Sun Life Overview

A leading international financial services organization building trusted and lasting relationships with Clients around the world, with $1.3 trillion in assets under management, provides individuals and corporate clients with a diverse range of protection products (life and health) and wealth products (asset management, mutual funds, group pension and retirement, and individual annuity and savings). Chartered in 1865, Sun Life celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2015.

Client Experience Office (CXO) aims to build and deliver a holistic "One Sun Life" experience to Clients as we help them achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives.  The CXO is at the heart of Sun Life focused on attracting and engaging Clients through brand and performance marketing, engaging with Clients through the design, build, and delivery of client journeys, exceptional mobile and web channel experiences, and deepening relationships through personalized engagement across all channels and products.

To understand our Clients, we actively listen and learn by employing experts in Client experience, journey design, engagement, marketing, strategy, and digital, data and analytics.

Sun Life is a socially responsible organization with a commitment to sustainability in its practices and operations. Among other recognitions, the company appears regularly on the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World, as selected annually by Corporate Knights.

Role Summary

Reporting to the Vice-President, Experience, Planning and Transformation, CXO, the AVP, CXO Strategy & Transformation will help drive the development and stewardship of an integrated CXO vision and Client platform strategy and execution within CXO and across SL Canada.

This role will act as a senior strategic integrator across the CXO mandate—bringing together strategy, transformation, performance reporting, analytics, to tell a cohesive story. The successful candidate will help build insights discipline, and change capability required to simplify how CXO works, sharpen decision-making, and ensure investments are clearly linked to client, advisor, sponsor, business, risk, and financial outcomes.

The role requires a strong mix of strategic thinking, business management, financial and analytical acumen, executive-level communication and pragmatic execution. The candidate will be expected to work closely with CXO leadership, Canadian business partners, Finance, Technology, and  Global partners, and senior stakeholders to develop a cohesive CXO-wide narrative, strengthen performance management, programmatically manage spend and priorities, and ensure the function is operating with appropriate risk, auditability, and governance standards.

This is a high-impact role for a proven strategy and transformation leader who can connect the dots across complex domains, turn data into insight, create structure from ambiguity, and help move a large, multi-disciplinary function from reporting activity to driving measurable action.

What will you do?

Transformation Enablement & Strategic Prioritization

• Build and mature the transformation capability within CXO, including the disciplines, forums, metrics, decision processes, and execution routines required to drive sustained change.

• Support the development of a clear transformation agenda across our strategic priority areas

• Partner with our business stakeholders to optimize operating model

• Programmatically manage CXO priorities, ensuring investments are linked to strategy, engagement, sales enablement, experience outcomes, and risk reduction.

• Support the development of CXO’s AI narrative, including where the function should focus leadership attention, investment, experimentation, and capability-building.

Analytics, Insights & “Book of Truth”

• Lead the development of CXO’s insights agenda, ensuring the function moves from fragmented data and dashboard production to a disciplined, insight-driven management system.

• Partner with the Data organization on data production while owning the interpretation, synthesis, and business application of insights for CXO decision-making.

• Translate data into clear implications for strategy, investment, performance, risk, client behaviour, advisor dynamics, and franchise-level opportunities.

• Triage and manage analytics and reporting requests from business partners, balancing stakeholder needs with capacity, strategic relevance, and cost discipline.

• Ensure insights are clear, actionable, and tailored for senior audiences, including Canadian Strategy, Canadian Leadership Team, Finance, CXO peers, and other executive stakeholders.

Performance Reporting & Management

• Redesign CXO’s performance reporting in partnership with Finance, simplifying existing reports and replacing activity-based reporting with outcome-oriented management routines.

• Assess current reporting, processes, accountabilities, and team activities with a view to strengthening alignment, simplifying ways of working, and focusing effort on the highest-value priorities.

• Build a modern monthly and quarterly business review model that links strategy, outcomes, initiatives, financials, risks, dependencies, and decisions.

• Partner with Finance and business stakeholders to ensure performance reporting is aligned with financial reporting, cost management, planning, and prioritization.

• Create executive-ready performance narratives that clearly explain progress, trade-offs, risks, gaps, and decisions required.

• Identify and address duplication, legacy reporting layers, and inherited processes that no longer serve the current CXO mandate.

CXO Strategy, Executive Narrative & Enterprise Alignment

• Lead the development of a cohesive CXO-wide strategy, ensuring strategy is owned centrally and connected across each CXO vertical.

• Develop a clear CXO-wide story that sets out the team’s priorities, planned changes, key investments, and path to execution.

• Support Canada Executive Team (CET), Board, and senior executive reporting by creating concise, integrated materials that connect CXO priorities to enterprise strategy and measurable business outcomes.

• Conduct deep strategic workups across key CXO domains to inform activation plans, investment priorities, transformation sequencing, and leadership decisions.

• Establish mechanisms to set and maintain the transformation tempo for Canada, ensuring CXO can connect strategy to execution in a disciplined way.

• Clarify distinctions between product, experience, engagement, communications, and enterprise strategy to reduce confusion and improve alignment.

• Support the development of communications and engagement strategies required to activate CXO priorities across the function and with key partners.

What do you need to succeed?

• 10+ years of progressive experience in strategy, transformation, business management, consulting, financial services, client experience, operations, technology enablement, or related corporate leadership roles.

• Demonstrated experience supporting or leading enterprise transformation, strategic planning, executive governance, portfolio management, or performance management.

• Strong experience working with senior executives and preparing materials for executive committees, leadership teams, Boards, or equivalent senior governance forums.

• Proven ability to build strategic narratives, simplify complex issues, and connect strategy, financials, risk, technology, client outcomes, and execution.

• Experience developing performance management routines, dashboards, business reviews, scorecards, management reporting, or executive reporting processes.

• Strong financial and analytical acumen, including the ability to interpret cost structures, investment trade-offs, technology spend, business performance, and operational metrics.

• Experience working across cross-functional teams, including Technology, Finance, Data, Digital, Marketing, Operations, Risk, and business partners.

• Experience leading teams, developing talent, and building operating models or ways of working in a complex matrixed environment.

Key Competencies

• Problem Solving & Insights

  • Big picture thinking. Excellent strategic thinking and framing capabilities

  • Strong judgment for value and prioritization

  • Capability to go beyond the obvious and identify critical insights, based on qualitative and quantitative analysis

  • Capability to design appropriate analytical approaches, drive through analysis and distill evidence-based insights to make business recommendations

• Practicality & Effectiveness

  • Bias for action. Capability to apply 80/20 to make sensible decisions and stay on course when facing obstacles

  • Capability to collaborate with internal and external counterparts to identify discrepancies and find actionable solutions

  • Business and organizational acumen to apply a feasibility filter on strategic recommendations and executional tasks

• Communication & Presence

  • Succinct and convincing communication styles, in verbal and written formats

  • Professional and mature presence. Credibility in formal and casual discussions

• Team

  • Capability in day-to-day team leadership and guidance

  • Willingness and capability to coach and develop people

What's in it for you?

• A competitive salary and bonus program, based on market scale

• A flexible group insurance program starting on your first day of work to meet your needs and those of your family.

• Time off that allows you to focus on the moments that matter most. 20 vacation days per year.

• Our Share Ownership Program gives you the opportunity to invest in Sun Life while benefiting from employer matching contributions.

• We are proud to be included in Great Place to Work's 2026 list of Canada's Best Workplaces.

• A warm, supportive, and inclusive culture.

The Base Pay range is for the primary location for which the job is posted. It may vary depending on the work location of the successful candidate or other factors. In addition to Base Pay, eligible Sun Life employees participate in various incentive plans, payment under which is discretionary and subject to individual and company performance. Certain sales focused roles have sales incentive plans based on individual or group sales results.  

Diversity and inclusion have always been at the core of our values at Sun Life. A diverse workforce with wide perspectives and creative ideas benefits our Clients, the communities where we operate and all of us as colleagues. We welcome applications from qualified individuals from all backgrounds.

Persons with disabilities who need accommodation in the application process, or those needing job postings in an alternative format, may e-mail a request to [email protected].

We are proud to be a hybrid organization that offers our employees the choice and flexibility to work from both the office and virtually based on the needs of the business, our Clients and you! Several work options are available and can be discussed throughout the selection process depending on the role requirements and individual needs.

We may use artificial intelligence to support candidate sourcing, screening, interview scheduling.

We thank all applicants for showing an interest in this position. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

Salary Range:

140,000/140 000 - 225,000/225 000

Job Category:

Business Development - Non Actuarial

Posting End Date:

25/06/2026