Financial Data Quality Analyst C - Johannesburg at FNB South Africa

Purpose

• To supervise a specialist team in the investigation and resolution of any errors or incidents that are raised or reported against the programmed functionality of the Banks’ financial processes, systems and ledgers. This includes interpreting incident/ error reports to diagnose underlying problems, driving and tracking the progress of proposed solutions as well as implementing enhancements on existing processes. (Amongst others, errors and incidents may relate to financial balancing and reconciliations, journal processing controls, data integrity and warehousing, financial reporting or fraud prevention).

Experience and Qualifications

• Relevant undergraduate degree in Finance / IT / Accounting.
• 3-5 years working experience in similar environment.
• Proven experience working with and knowledge of in data quality management, balancing and reconciliations, and financial reporting.

Responsibilities

• Identify process improvements in order to save costs.
• Identify, control and escalate potential risks which may lead to increased costs.
• Manage costs or expenses within approved budget to achieve cost efficiencies.
• Deliver against operational and cost targets.
• Ensure team adherence to specified policies, standards and procedures to prevent and reduce wastage and escalate associated risks.
• Implement, manage and report on cost improvement objectives and communicate or escalate any shortfalls.
• Prioritise resource allocation in order to minimise and reduce wastage in order to minimise fruitless expenditure.
• Maintenance of expert knowledge on relevant legislative amendments, industry best practices and provision of proactive advice and solutions to relevant stakeholders.
• Develop a deep understanding of the operational processes, methodologies, tools, systems and data employed by the Systems Accounting team in order to develop specialist technical and financial knowledge that can support immediate colleagues, team practices and processes, and systemic enhancements within the Bank.
• Identify unmet business needs and coach business partners on leading their own technology initiatives.
• Work closely with immediate colleagues to build capability across the team through sharing insights, learnings and subject matter expertise, and to collaterally support all systems accounting efforts to change, run and guide the Bank.
• Manage internal stakeholders and adhere to relevant SLA agreements.
• Cultivate and manage objective working relationships with a variety of stakeholders, including end-users, SME’s, project managers and senior staff members.
• Build and sustain collaborative working relationships with relevant peers and stakeholders in order to achieve productivity synergies.
• Maintain and build relationships for purposes of expectation management, knowledge sharing and integration.
• Maintain a critical and broad / birds eye view of the Banks’ financial systems, with an understanding of the end to end flow of processes and information from one business area to the next, and ultimately to the general ledger.
• Ensure that systems accounting processes and systems are aligned to meet business, legal and regulatory requirements.
• Collaborate closely with immediate colleagues to ensure that systems accounting methods, processes and solutions are designed to be integrated, automated where possible, and compliant with operational, financial, legal and regulatory risk requirements.
• Interpret exception and/or incident reports, and conduct mainframe / source data checks to determine error validity, cause and extent.
• Propose solutions to perform tactical and strategic fixes.
• Routinely monitor an test all environments to prevent issues from adversely impacting customer and general ledger accounts
• Monitor exception reports and conduct manual recons as necessary to track tactical fixes.
• Monitor the system accounting incident report to track the progress of strategic fixes; test solutions post development to confirm that underlying problems have been addressed
• Utilise standard methodologies to ensure that the sub- and general ledger balance and reconcile; upload data and relevant financial journal.
• Take all necessary actions to ensure compliance with relevant statutory, legislative, policy and governance requirements in area of accountability.
• Maintain expert knowledge on relevant legislative amendments.
• Implement and provide input into the development of governance and compliance procedures and processes within area of specialisation and identify risks.
• Ensure optimal usage and protection of business assets industry best practices and FNB’s internal compliance procedures and requirements.
• Ensure compliance is adopted in terms of systems and procedures as laid out by FNB.
• Work with business partner to elicit high-level requirements, capture business needs, and to identify unmet business opportunities that support both the business strategy and project requirements.
• Determine information requirements to guide data management, integration and automation decisions
• Apply systems accounting methodologies in clearly articulating, documenting and designing business, process and system requirements.
• Assess the risks of various solutions utilising standard systems accounting methodologies, tools and frameworks, and prioritise competing business demands.
• Coordinate project delivery by participating in design reviews and walk-throughs to communicate system designs and validate proposed solutions.
• Obtain key inputs from enterprise architecture teams and identify solution interdependencies.
• Engage with relevant specialists within the systems accounting team and across the business (for example the finance, IT and risk teams), to incorporate legal and regulatory requirements, and usability and user interface needs when designing systems.
• Manage ongoing relationship with business partner to drive satisfaction with IT and proactively resolve business partner delivery and satisfaction issues.
• Identify effective activities to address own development gaps.
• Create own development plan and review plan with team leader or manager.
• Understand which competencies and skills are required to be mastered to ensure personal development and performance.
• Keep abreast of learning opportunities, changing products and trends.
• Participate and contribute to a development culture where information regarding successes, issues, trends and ideas are actively shared.
• Build and sustain collaborative working relationships with relevant peers and stakeholders in order to achieve productivity synergies.
• Promote and develop a continuous improvement culture.