South Africa: Document & Plain Language Analyst posted by MECS Africa

• Maintain the master documentation register – a living matrix of every document by category, product, version, effective date, owner, last review date and next review date.
• Operate a formal change-control workflow: Compliance, Legal, Product, Operations and (where relevant) Risk sign-off before any document goes live.
• Ensure only current, approved versions are in circulation across client portals, adviser portals, form.io, PDF packs, SharePoint and internal knowledge bases. Obsolete versions are archived with retention metadata intact.
• Maintain audit-ready evidence trails for every change – what changed, why, who approved it, when it went live, and which client cohorts were affected. Produced on demand for internal audit, Compliance reviews and FSCA queries.
• Own the document retention schedule in line with FICA, FAIS, Income Tax Act and FSCA requirements.

Plain language ownership
Accountabilities:

• Be the custodian of PAS’s plain language standard. Maintain the in-house style guide, tone-of-voice principles, glossary of plain-language equivalents for financial and regulatory terminology, and the bank of approved standard phrases and clauses.
• Set and monitor readability targets for client-facing documents calibrated to the target audience of each document.
• Run plain-language reviews on every new or amended client-facing document before publication. Provide tracked-change redlines with rationale.
• Benchmark PAS’s documentation against market gold standards and against published plain-language standards (ISO 24495-1)
• Measure outcomes – query volumes to client services, complaint themes, adviser escalations, and retention of information in client comprehension testing. Feed these back into the documentation roadmap.
• Train and coach colleagues across Operations, Compliance, Legal, Product and IT on plain-language writing – so that the standard is embedded, not enforced after the fact.

Digitisation of forms onto form.io
PAS is migrating its form estate from static PDFs to structured digital forms on form.io, integrated with downstream systems. This is a multi-year programme that this role leads from the documentation side.
Accountabilities:

• Design forms as data schemas, not as documents. Define fields, field types, validation rules, conditional display logic, required/optional status, default values and data bindings into Maxim, Citazen and the process orchestration layer.
• Build and maintain a reusable component library on form.io – standard FICA sections, beneficiary blocks, banking detail capture, adviser selection, disclosure acknowledgements – so that new forms compose from trusted building blocks rather than being built from scratch.
• Partner with UX/design, IT and Operations on the form journey – not just the form. What pre-populates? What is skipped for known clients? What triggers a wet-signature requirement versus SigningHub? What happens at abandonment and resumption?
• Translate regulatory and product requirements into form.io configuration – validation rules that enforce the rule at point of capture, rather than policing it in Ops downstream.
• Retire legacy forms as digital equivalents go live. Maintain a bilingual period (PDF + digital) only where legally required or where adviser/client readiness demands it, and with a defined sunset date.
• Ensure digital form output is legally equivalent to the paper form it replaces – test end-to-end, document the equivalence, and obtain Legal/Compliance sign-off before retirement of the PDF.

Impact analysis across processes, systems and documents
Accountabilities:

• Analyse proposed changes – business, operational, product, system or regulatory – and produce clear impact assessments covering affected processes, system fields and validations, forms, disclosures, statements, confirmations, letters and training material.
• Use the documentation register as the first lens on any change: which documents are affected, what needs to change in each, who needs to approve, and what the publication dependencies are.
• Coordinate with the BPM process team so that when workflows or systems change, the supporting documentation is updated in the same release window. No release goes live with stale forms or letters.
• Maintain traceability between process steps, system fields, form fields, and document content – so that a change in any one can be traced to its impact on all others.

Legal ax and regulatory change translation
Accountabilities:

• Track and log legal, tax and regulatory changes affecting platform products and client journeys – for example two-pot retirement, FAIS amendments, FICA/AML updates, SARS tax directive changes, FSCA conduct standards, LISP de minimis threshold changes, Section 37C interpretations.
• Conduct the initial impact scan on every change: which product lines, transactions, forms, disclosures, workflows, letters and client communications are affected.
• Partner with Compliance, Legal and Tax for the official interpretation – and then translate that approved position into plain-language client content and clear operational instructions.
• Rewrite complex legal, tax or regulatory wording into plain-language client content without changing the approved meaning. Where the two cannot be reconciled, escalate and document the tension.
• Identify and coordinate updates to FAQs, website content, client letters and notices, adviser communications, training material and internal SOPs for each regulatory change.

Template and design-system thinking
Accountabilities:

• Treat the document estate as a design system, not a pile of Word files. Maintain a single master template for each document category with consistent typography, colour, spacing, header/footer treatment aligned to Peregrine brand standards.
• Build and maintain a library of reusable content blocks – standard FAIS disclosures, fee explanations, tax disclaimers, complaint procedures, contact details – so that updating one disclosure updates it everywhere it appears.
• Maintain consistent voice, tone and terminology across all artefacts in a product family. A client who reads the application form, the contract confirmation and the annual statement should recognise the same PAS voice throughout.
• Coordinate with Marketing/Brand on visual identity alignment – and push back where regulatory or usability requirements conflict with brand aesthetics.

 Quality assurance, measurement and continuous improvement
Accountabilities:

• Define and report on documentation KPIs – readability scores against targets, time from regulatory change to document update, volume of client queries traced to document clarity, adviser escalations relating to form or letter content, audit findings on documentation control.
• Perform structured reviews on the document estate – at minimum annually, and whenever a product, process or regulatory trigger occurs.
• Drive continuous improvement of checklists, templates, form schemas and workflows to reduce recurring exceptions and rework.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI and intelligent document processing – for example, using Amplify 360 to pre-screen plain-language quality, flag deviations from the standard clause library, or detect drift in tone across documents.

Project delivery
Accountabilities:

• Participate in project delivery across all stages – requirements, design, build, test, launch – to ensure documentation and form deliverables meet business requirements.
• Complete tasks to the standards and deadlines agreed in the project plan.
• Communicate documentation and process impacts clearly to stakeholders: what changes, who it affects, when it goes live, what users must do.
• Provide post-go-live support – responding to user issues through knowledge transfer, and referring system-level issues to IT.