Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - EP32: My job as a central bank regulatory auditor.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. In today's podcast, I want to talk about the time I spent as a regulatory auditor with EarnSingYang Singapore. So EarnSingYang is one of the biggest global accounting firms in the world. And I joined the financial services department in 2010, a long time ago.

Starting point is 00:00:52 So when I joined, I was basically doing external audit for some time. And probably a couple of months in, I was given the opportunity to try out compliance reviews, so regulatory compliance reviews on behalf of the Central Bank of Singapore. So in case you're not very familiar with the term financial services, this is essentially the industry that includes banks, insurance companies, and fund managers, securities companies, basically the highly regulated entities. So as part of my role doing regulatory reviews, I had to understand the regulatory policy. I also had to perform a lot of qualitative review, a lot of analysis and identifying control gaps and non-compliance that are essentially reportable back to the central bank which is essentially will become the report that the bank will get

Starting point is 00:01:53 assessed against on an annual basis within the the country's you know holistic financial system itself so i'm not going to bore you guys with all the um the legalities around that but i just wanted to share a little bit more about how you can thrive by identifying the areas that you are good at versus the ones that you're not good at as well as some of the um the key skills that i picked up while being in this um in this role and really specializing in this space and how that has helped in my career along the way so i started like i said as an external auditor for unsung young where you know if you're familiar with external audit it's basically checking on numbers for for the most part reviewing numbers and making sure the numbers reconcile consul and basically quantitative analysis. So early on, you know, when I was studying and even during my time as an external auditor,

Starting point is 00:02:53 I gradually came to realize that I didn't really enjoy the numbers as much because I am definitely not a natural mathematician. So numbers is definitely not my strong point. Like I can make it happen, but it's not something that I would naturally gear towards. So when I got the opportunity to try out compliance reviews in some of the audit projects, I thought, wow, this is really fun because number one,

Starting point is 00:03:26 I was supposed to look at regulatory policies and making sure that I understood all the various interpretations. So I felt that it really appealed to the more intellectual side of me and really trying to get creative and think about the various interpretations and so forth. Aside from that, I also got the opportunity to do more qualitative reviews. So these are qualitative analysis and really identify specific non-compliance by reviewing concepts and understanding frameworks and how, for example, an anti-money laundering framework was set up, whether the client has set it up correctly, what are the components in there, are there any gaps in the frameworks. So I thought that really appealed to me because I'm a person who really enjoys looking at something end-to-end. So the ability to really review a framework from

Starting point is 00:04:21 end-to-end and really identify what are the gaps in there, what are the improvement areas that could be implemented. I found that extremely fun. So, so we speak to a lot of people, they may think, they may say that, oh, regulatory compliance is really boring, but I think it's really quite fun. So, you know, these things, it's really important that we identify what we are good at, right, in terms of like the areas for review, whether it's, you know, the broader job itself or specific components within the job that you are really good at from a skill set perspective. But more importantly, what do you really enjoy doing? For example, I know I don't enjoy dealing with numbers, but I know I enjoy

Starting point is 00:05:05 really looking at like frameworks, doing a deep dive on it and then identifying, okay, what works and what's not working. So that was something that I discovered quite early on in my career, which I think has really, really helped me to choose my career path and the really right roles later on, which I knew that not only I was really good at you know at because at that point I was really building skills not only I was good at but I truly enjoyed I thought it was fun so fun is not a word that you normally associate with compliance but that was something I definitely did associate with that um aside from that it also equipped me with report writing skills.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Because especially in Singapore, if you're doing a regulatory compliance review, there is a need to produce a report that ultimately will be sent over to the central bank of the country, basically looking at the compliance or rather non-compliance of certain aspects of the bank, for example. So there was, I guess, high risk, high reward, definitely high visibility projects. Everybody is always interested to look at the compliance report. I would say even way more than the financial statement, even way more than the numbers. So everyone was definitely very interested in that so i was initially i was involved even at a very junior level really collating gaps that i identified articulating it

Starting point is 00:06:32 really expressing and communicating those those compliance gaps in writing in the form of a report as well as verbally because these points are required to be presented to clients normally in meetings, which I would go with a manager or a senior manager. So I was really involved in negotiating, communicating, really expressing myself in terms of, and I guess logically justifying why certain points had to be certain points. So those are kind of skills that pretty much gel in together. And ultimately, you know, these are opportunities that we need to grab. Like, for example, if I did not actually do, I did not do any of the compliance audit at all, I may have missed out the opportunity to develop my report writing skills.

Starting point is 00:07:46 I may lose out the opportunity to develop how to, I guess not develop, but how to enhance my ability to communicate in writing in a highly precise, direct and concise and succinct manner that not only can be understood by me, my manager, the partner, but more importantly, by the client as well as the regulator, which are obviously, you know, like I say, high risk, high reward, right? So with every, I guess, difficulty, there's always something that you can learn and always some skills that you can definitely take away. So aside from that, like I said, like at a junior level, normally you will not be part of big discussions with management within the bank, which I had the opportunity to do so because I was really involved in the regulatory review,

Starting point is 00:08:12 some of these compliance gaps I had identified. So I was also given the opportunity to speak up during meetings. So even if I didn't, I got the opportunity to observe. So observation is really a powerful skill and tying in with observation is listening. So listening what the client has had to say and how my team has communicated some of the gaps and just really seeing that dynamic

Starting point is 00:08:37 has eventually allowed me to learn how to really manage stakeholder dynamic, how to create win-win outcomes, really how to manage people at the level of influence, but at the same time support. Because you don't want to influence someone and make the other person feel like there's nothing in it for them.

Starting point is 00:08:56 So in the future, when I ran, when it was really my turn, I was senior enough to run my own management meetings, I found all these really really important because i had learned from really early on in my career that nobody likes to lose nobody likes to lose so that's why nowadays i really emphasize the need to create a win-win relationship with people so even last time when i was i guess you can call it selling the compliance gaps to be accepted by the clients there are always little strategies that we

Starting point is 00:09:25 use to make sure that the client feels like it is for their ultimate benefit and there are some points that we are always open to negotiate and drop should there be certain commitment by the client to improve or you know from a materiality perspective it's not really important so so really these are some of the key skills so some people people say, okay, Audit, I don't learn anything. It's not true. You learn what you have decided to learn, what you have decided to focus on and what you have decided to pick up. If you feel that a job is useless, that you will always be useless because you have not really set out how you can actually gain benefit from it. You're just going to be there, be idle and then complain, which is not the state of most of the clients I work with, right?

Starting point is 00:10:09 So yeah, I mean, some of the really important skills that I really took on in my career and now what I teach my clients are communication, listening, like I said, in this situation, managing expectations, especially by your client, and win-win relationships as well. Because if you cannot create win-win relationships with people, then it will always remain transactional. Nobody will really want to support you because you get everything, but they get nothing out of it. So that's really the challenge that a lot of

Starting point is 00:10:40 young leaders face because I actually work with a lot of ambitious young leaders and one of the common problems I find is that they are very gung-ho to achieve something but it's really only for themselves. So no one else actually benefits or really able to get any value from some of the stuff that they are doing. So and hence they are unable to create win-win relationships and long-term relationships at that. So this is a really important area that I help most of my clients deal with. Most of them are in leadership roles, either as a team leader, they are managing regional teams or global teams. So this is a really, really important skill to learn.

Starting point is 00:11:20 Managing stakeholders and creating win-win relationships. So if you are someone who is very junior, you can start developing these skills now. Don't wait until you become a leader and then try picking it up because it may be a little bit too late. So I highly encourage you to get started and yeah, know what's fun for you, know what you're good at and know what you enjoy. I think to me, that was the biggest lesson kind of delving into the regulatory audit space, which kind of came to me by chance, but ultimately something that I really took forward in my career down the road. So yeah, like I said, I mainly help my clients with these super, super important skills. And if you feel like this sounds like you, there's something that

Starting point is 00:12:01 resonates with you, feel free to reach out to me on social media let's chat let's explore how i can best help you develop those skills and yeah looking forward to your developments yeah

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - EP32: My job as a central bank regulatory auditor.

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