Asia Regulatory Control Specialist

The role sits within the Operations COO organisation. We are a dynamic, global and diverse organization focused on regulatory controls for Markets Operations, which has a presence in over 60 Countries; covering all post execution Operations teams including product aligned Middle Office groups, Settlements, Margin, Asset Servicing, Listed Derivative & Commodities Operations. We support an extensive range of Capital Markets products and services including Fixed Income (FX, Rates, Credit, Muni, Cash and Derivatives) where Citi is consistently a dominant top 3 player in the market, Equity (Cash, Derivatives, Prime Brokerage, Futures, Listed Derivs, FXPB) where Citi has a significant growth program to continue to build out its capabilities and services; and Syndicates where we support both FI and EQ new issues and IPOs. 

Our Operations groups are core to the success of the Markets business and have a significant impact across the lifecycle of a Trade. We partner extensively with a range of internal stakeholders including Front Office Sales and Trading Desks, Compliance, Legal, Finance and HR; alongside having significant interaction with our external client base, playing a key role in the overall client experience. Markets Operations have a Client Relationship Group dedicated to overseeing the group service performance and strategic partnership for our top tier client base, where we play a key role in supporting our global clients to ensure they have a first-class experience when doing business with Citi. 

Market Ops Digitization and Implementation group works alongside our Operations teams delivering automation solutions to solve operational challenges. We partner with Citi’s innovation labs to drive optimization and overall play a pivotal role in enabling us to transform to achieve our target operating model. 

Our Technology partners develop and implement a wide range of applications that support the Operations, Change, Design, and Implementation groups in providing innovative products and solutions. We have re-imagined how to provide technology and service in our domain through the alignment of our team vision, culture, and aggressive retirement plan for legacy applications and adoption of a micro-based containerized cloud environment. We encourage our people to create, explore and be adventurous whilst taking measured risks, adopting safe practices to protect the firm. Data lineage and optimization is core to how we develop our eco system. We are growing our capabilities using artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning.

Our roles entail ensuring we operate in a robust control environment, whilst in a fast-paced workplace. We comply with global regulations and internal policies and adopt a proactive approach to identifying opportunities to reduce risk through the continuous evaluation of our controls; to protect our clients, the firm and our reputation. 

We work closely with our external global peers, partners, and regulators, and play an integral part in leading an agenda at the forefront to optimise and streamline processes and drive strategy across our industry.

Team Overview:

Markets Operations Regulatory & Control is a newly created centralized team responsible for oversight of regulatory functions. The vision is to implement a best-in-class regulatory control framework focused on risk reduction, process improvement, ensuring consistency and transparency of all regulatory matters impacting Global Markets Operations. 

The target operating model consists of 4 key components:

Regulatory Quality Assurance (QA) – Proactive execution of risk-based QA reviews to identify gaps and partner with the Market Operations teams to remediate any identified gaps

BAU Regulatory Control – Monitoring of regulatory control exceptions and partnering with the relevant stakeholders to identify and remediate root causes at source

Regulatory Change Management – Drive and implement various regulatory change and remediation programs for Market Operations; execute a robust change management framework to allow for the regulatory impact of operational and technology changes to be adequately assessed

Regulatory & Legal Entity Governance – Oversee all aspects of regulatory and legal entity governance including but not limited to issue management, regulatory interactions, and the implementation of adequate governance forums to drive accountability and transparency

Job Purpose:

This is a newly created role where the candidate will lead and contribute to initiatives in Asia across regulatory quality assurance, issue management, audit/reg exam and transaction oversight.

Specifics of the role include:

Executequality assurance reviews for identifiedregulatory reports and processes

Execute regulatory strategy for Market Ops across teams in Asia in partnership with SMEs/leadership team

Evaluate teams’ compliance with regulatory reporting framework through both broad-based and targeted reviews

Liaise with the SMEs to agree on required remediation, monitor completion of actions and adequacy of remediation to mitigate the identified risk

Monitor adoption of regulatory framework governance across teams in Market Operations

Produce management reporting on issue management assurance reviews

Co-ordinate responses for regulatory exams/audits as needed

Investigate issues/breaches occurring in the region and provide counsel on remediation plans

The role provides a range of opportunities to impact and influence the overall target state design and implementation of our strategic transformation priorities including:

Implementing best practices and global consistency, simplifying & standardizing processes, and flows

Opportunity to learn and acquireexpertise across a range of products and asset classes

Significant interaction with a wide range of stakeholder groups and senior management to help drive the agenda

Key Responsibilities:

Organizational Oversight:

Maintain a culture and environment where processes, risks and controls are continually monitored, and potential risks escalated on a timelybasis

Developing an effective control framework that fully meets Audit, Compliance and Regulatory requirements; contributing to the delivery of periodic presentations to external regulators as required

Transformation to Target State:

Review our suite of controls and suggest change to uplift the risk profile throughout the Organisation and its products

Drive standardization of controls across regions and suggest opportunities for harmonisation across teams

Implement plans and execute vs milestones ensuring we meet deadlines and regulatory commitments

Ensure our infrastructure and tools meet the needs to manage risk. Develop and suggest operating model changes to pivot Operations towards digitization and a robust control environment

Story Telling:

Help drive comprehensive risk KPIs/Metrics by Legal entity for senior executive consumption – for each product and function, working in close partnership with the product Leaders

Analyse risk metrics for trends and lessons learnt

Partner with the Ops product leaders to understand and update process flows, challenges and potential solutions and present opportunities to senior Management

Articulate solutions vs current state for digitization, automation, low code solutions and straight through processing

People Agenda: 

Contribute to a culture of continuous improvement and cultivating a robust service and control environment

Engage with our people and contribute to the development of effective and diverse teams across a global footprint

Coach and mentor our people. Champion diversity and inclusion to create a working environment which allows our people to thrive and excel

Skills & Qualifications:

BS/BA degree or equivalent work experience

Relevant experience in a related operations role with commensurate product knowledge and risk/audit experience

Expertise in SQL and Python preferred

Excellent verbal, written, and presentation skills. In particular, demonstrated ability to effectively communicate technical and business issues and solutions to multiple organizational levels internally and externally as needed to support strategic goals.

Strong risk management and control mindset

Self-reliant, good problem solver, results oriented

Strong awareness of both external and internal best practice perspectives, maintaining a balanced and fresh viewpoint.

Demonstrated ability to succeed in a complex organization where the ability to discover and internalize diverse stakeholder goals is critical to brokering solutions that are in the best interest of Citi as a whole

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Job Family Group:

Compliance and Control

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Job Family:

Business Control

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Time Type:

Full time

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