Assurance Manager: Market Conduct Risk at Nedbank

Job Purpose

• To perform assurance reviews across the bank’s business clusters and manage stakeholder relationships to ensure market conduct risk is mitigated in accordance with Nedbank Group standards.
• To achieve this, the Market Conduct Risk Assurance Manager will support the Head of Market Conduct Risk Assurance with the planning, delivery and performance of Market Conduct Risk Assurance activities. 

Job Responsibilities

• Strategic Insights & Client Centricity
• Stay abreast of developments in field of expertise, emerging risks and industry trends (including competitors and digital trends).
• Understand current business strategy, reality, impact of transformation, digital initiatives, risks and expectations and consider key and/or emerging risks to update the annual risk-based annual audit plan, in order to support relevant Assurance reporting.
• Be commercially minded with a Nedbank client centric approach and understand the broader business strategy in the assurance approach.
• Contribute to the overall Market Conduct Risk assurance strategy and planning process.

Transformational Assurance

• Lead and execute assurance assignment planning, fieldwork and reporting in line with the assurance methodology.
• Seek opportunities to improve business processes, models, and systems through agile thinking.
• Identify and assess the design adequacy and operational effectiveness of manual and automated controls within the scope of work and utilising data analytics. Adequacy and effectiveness will be conducted on the alignment, adherence and escalation of Market Conduct principles. 
• Perform mystery shopping activities to evaluate and ensure compliance with company standards and enhance the overall customer experience as part of assurance reviews.
• Perform outcomes testing activities to assess the effectiveness of processes and controls, ensuring alignment with regulatory requirements and organisational standards as part of assurance reviews. Outcomes testing will be conducted on the alignment, adherence and escalation of Market Conduct principles. 
• Identify and ensure compliance with relevant market conduct principles, guidelines and policies in line with assurance scope.
• Influence stakeholders to address inefficiencies in resolving findings through utilising professional experience in demonstrating benefits of best practice.
• Ensure continuous improvement of the quality of assurance through providing professional insights.
• Ensure improved productivity and efficiency and the delivery of projects and assurance assignment within agreed timelines.
• Achieve operational excellence and support the implementation of business optimisation improvement in assurance.
• Apply professional judgement in all assurance interactions.
• Deal with complex verbal and documented information and data in the assurance process.
• Digital Platform & Data Driven Assurance reviews: Apply knowledge of banking sector, digital transformation, and emerging risks to assess and engage with stakeholders on large-scale and complex changing environments, data, IT infrastructure and technology and determine best approach and testing strategy to provide insightful reporting.
• Identify and assess the client impact of material IT incidents to ensure timely resolution and maintaining  service continuity and client satisfaction.

Job Responsibilities Continue

• Integrated Risk and Control Environment
• Engage with business and the risk, compliance and audit community to ensure coordinated assurance approach and assessment of risk and control to ensure scope is appropriately defined.

Impactful Reporting

• Prepare quality, relevant and commercially astute assignment and reports that provide intelligence and meaningful insights that enable the management of market conduct risk to be a strategic and competitive differentiator for Nedbank.
• The ability of story-telling and writing reports in a succinct and concise manner which is visually appealing and at an appropriate level for various stakeholders and governance forums.

Business Partner Relationships

• Build and maintain an open and constructive relationship during and outside of scheduled as a Trusted Advisor with senior internal and external stakeholders including  Business Executives and the risk, compliance and internal audit community.
• Build trusting relationships and improve credibility and quality of assurance outputs by achieving team objectives through engaging with staff, peers and other departments for reporting purposes.

Effective Leadership

• Create an environment of teamwork that contributes to Group Market Conduct Risk;
• Ensure personal growth and enable effectiveness in performance of roles and responsibilities.
• Contribute to the Nedbank Culture building initiatives (e.g. staff surveys etc.).

Essential Qualifications - NQF Level

• Professional Qualifications/Honour’s Degree
• Preferred Qualification
• Internal Auditing (Honours)
• Charted Accounting [CA (SA)]
• Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA)

Preferred Certifications

• Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) and optional Certified Internal Auditor (CIA)
• Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) or Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) or Certified Financial Services Auditor (CFSA)

Minimum Experience Level

• 5+ years in banking/ financial services industry experience (preferably within Auditing or Risk)
• 5+ years’ experience (minimum 5 years) with Internal auditing.
• 5+ years’ experience (minimum 5 years) with risk management experience.

Types of Exposures

• Influencing stakeholders to obtain buy-in for concepts and ideas.
• Ability to handle and resolve conflict. 
• Sharing information in different ways to increase stakeholders understanding.
• Building and maintaining effective relationships with Risk community and other internal and external stakeholders.
• Interacting with diverse people
• Analysing and interpreting qualitative and quantitative data
• Financial services; preferable banking – retail and commercial exposure (products and or/channels)
• Communicating standards to others
• Consolidate data from various sources and identify/interpret trends.