A Decade of Internal Auditing..
As the decade came to a close I was reflecting upon the 10 years of professional life that just flew away in a flash for me. Managing my Internal Audit function still thrills me just like the first day I took over as the Head of Internal Audit way back in 2010. As a naive, internal auditor who came from mostly banking technology and cyber security backgrounds, it was challenging for me, in those initial days, to sit in Board rooms and talk about Financial, Strategic & Credit risks. It was also challenging for me to sit across business heads, who were industry stalwarts, and challenge them on their business domains and assess their control environments. It was challenging to prove myself over and over again with different Board Audit Committees and two different CEOs. So I was thinking aloud as to what helped me do my job for so long without any major hiccups. The below 3 points stood out which I thought shall be shared with a bigger audience.
1. Belief in my team. I never believed that I had all the best auditors in the country working for me. But I was sure that collectively as a team we were at par with the best teams in our industry.
2. Continuous efforts to change the perception of Internal Auditor. The strong misnomer that the term Internal Auditor refers to someone who find faults and dig out the skeletons got changed slowly but steadily. Establishing internal Audit as a forward looking, objective and fair function who can see things from the auditee’s shoes was the turning point.
3. Internal Audit itself transformed as a profession. In line with the need of the ever changing digital landscape of the business, Internal Audit had to reinvent itself as a more tech-savvy, more digitally literate, more automated function. My technology roots probably helped to bifurcate facts from fiction and set up a realistic journey towards this goal.
Above all thank you #NoorBank for a decade of glorious experience. Thanks to all the Board Audit Committee Chairs for their valuable guidance and support. Thanks to the two CEOs #HussainAlQemzi and #JohnIossifidis for helping me do by job by being so tolerant to a skeptical internal Auditor who always had a question or two before getting convinced. Above all, thanks to a wonderful team who helped me complete the decade with such a good feeling that I will do exactly the same things with exactly the same team if I get a chance to rewrite the decade all over again..