Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep33: My job as a fintech internal controls specialist.

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 was an internal auditor and an internal control specialist with one of the biggest global payments company in the world, Visa. So this was one of the really fun roles I've done at that

Starting point is 00:00:46 point in time because I got the opportunity to travel all around the world. With Visa, I've been to many parts of Asia, visiting the big cities, the different people, different cultures, different background. That was really something that I enjoyed in that role and if you guys have been following me for some time now I'm sure you know that I love travel so this role with visa really really enabled me to fulfill both my personal as well as professional aspirations so So that was extremely, extremely exciting at that time. So I took on the internal auditor role because after spending quite a number of years in external audit, I realized that I did not really like numbers. So it was a natural

Starting point is 00:01:41 progression for me to move towards an area that I felt that I was a lot stronger in, and that is internal controls assessment. So the opportunity visa came out at the right time. I was pretty much scrolling LinkedIn in 2013, came across this opportunity in the jobs section and proceeded to apply. So I got to join the company after I think about it was about five rounds of interview, some of which are were face to face, the other were, you know, virtual phone calls or VC, which at that time was really quite a big thing, right. So what I definitely enjoyed in the internal auditor role, you know, aside from all the travel and so forth, was that this role taught me how to really manage internal stakeholders. So in the past, when I was an external auditor and a regulatory auditor,

Starting point is 00:02:39 it was a lot easier to request for documents, request for information because I was an external party reviewing a company, right? So obviously, you know, there were a lot of agreements on the back end on documents provision and that was all fine. But as an internal auditor, I found that it was more challenging because you are not top priority, right? Everybody in the company has something to do. And yes, you know, internal audit is something that people need to, the departments need to go through. But sometimes, you know, in the business of it all, your stuff may not always be prioritized.

Starting point is 00:03:21 And the second challenge around that is that internal audit is sometimes seen as a bit of a police function within the company itself. So while yes, you know, we are all colleagues, but there is a certain perception given to the internal audit team. The fact that we are a bit of a police, you know, we are supposed to catch errors and we are not part of the whole team, so to speak, right? The massive company. So I found those two very, very interesting dynamics that I had to learn early on how to create win-win relationships, right? Getting along with people and creating win-win relationships, right? Getting along with people and creating win-win relationships, knowing that there is this negative connotation that people have on internal auditors. And

Starting point is 00:04:11 obviously I was one and I still wanted to make sure that I would do well. So those were the things that I had to really focus on. So how I came about this whole bit is really taking the time and having conversations with people and really understand where they're coming from and not just really pushing the points through because nobody likes to feel like they have to do something. Yes, we can still request for documents and, you know, we can be polite, pick up the phone, you know, give them a call, an email and so forth. That was really, really helpful. But I think just knowing this concept that it's really important to create win-win relationships does really go a long way. So some of the more interesting experiences I had traveling with visa was I went to quite a number of Asia offices.

Starting point is 00:05:12 For example, I was in Shanghai, Tokyo, and it was in Sydney and many parts of Southeast Asia as well. So you start to see the intricacies and the differences between cultures and the locations, backgrounds in the way people approach meetings. Some people are very, some countries are very precise. For example, in Japan, if the meeting starts at 10, the team would really be queuing up right in front of the meeting room at least five to 10 minutes before and we would do

Starting point is 00:05:41 all the pleasantries and so forth. But in some other countries, which I'm not going to name which one, it's a little bit more different. It's a bit more flexible. We all had to kind of make do around a frame in terms of like the times that we were going to commit to. So that was a bit of a difference. And it's really important to learn how to work with people from different cultures because we are now in the era of globalization and digitization has definitely helped that. If it's via webinars or video conference, it's all really important to be able to build that rapport, to be able to get along and communicate with one another. So that's something that I felt very fortunate to have been able to experience that at a very high level. And so many countries as well, when I was still an auditor, probably about five years into my career, five or seven years down my career. So that was something that definitely I could take away.

Starting point is 00:06:53 Of course, you know, the fun part was I got to travel on the plane to work rather than the traditional bus or taxi or train which was actually quite exciting so yeah I mean I also learned like personally for me I learned how to become a minimalist to not carry so many things to plan my days my week and my work well so that I could still have a bit of time after office hours to travel the city, to take a look at, to visit some of the attractions if time permits. So that was really the time of my life, I would say from a travel perspective, because I've been to so many countries and I've been to the San Francisco office for many, many weeks in a row and everything was extremely exciting. The team was extremely welcoming. So I think Visa as a global organization is really, is really one to beat for sure. Yeah, so I found that my experience with Visa really

Starting point is 00:07:58 prepped me for the next level because I got to pick up all these very important skills that I would say that people in different departments do not necessarily get the opportunity to do so, right? The opportunity to learn how to navigate between priorities of different teams, different functions, even different countries as well, like different management, and being able to negotiate that and making sure that there is still a win-win outcome on both ends while both departments, we still get to achieve what we need to achieve. And later on in my internal controls role, I got the opportunity to rebuild the second line of controls. And if you're in finance, I'm sure you know what I mean by this second line of controls. But it's just the effort

Starting point is 00:08:50 and the strategic thinking and the outlining of the entire framework of how Visa would run their second line review and monitoring and testing, which my ex-boss is currently leading that massive team on. I thought that was extremely exciting. And definitely that prepped me into the role that I would join next, which was standard chartered,

Starting point is 00:09:14 because that was what I spent most of my time doing, building frameworks and making sure that the governance is strong. And yeah, I'll go into all of that in my next episode. But I would say that if you love travel and you want to work with people from different countries, seek those opportunities in your current workplace, whether it's an assignment, it's a project, or of course, if you have the opportunity to travel right um whether it's a

Starting point is 00:09:46 training or even to um live abroad um i would highly encourage that because that is i think experiences with different cultures and different people is not really something that um you would get very often but it's definitely a very enriching experience so that's something that you should definitely think about and just really work that out as to how you can make your career a lot more enriching how will you make your career experience a lot more enriching that will make you a lot more valuable to your next employer, to your next employer. So I'll share a little bit more on how my exact experiences with Visa allowed me to join Standard Chartered almost seamlessly. I was actually headhunted to join one of the new,

Starting point is 00:10:35 the new team that was set up in Standard Chartered. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. And I hope you got some insights from this episode. And I look forward to sharing more of my corporate career journey with you and hopefully you guys can learn something yeah looking forward and we'll speak soon bye

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - Ep33: My job as a fintech internal controls specialist.

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