Experiences from Workplace

Recently during the last phase of the previous fiscal year,I faced the first auditing of my life.

I was told that auditors usually are nightmares ,checking every loophole like rabbits and there are bound to be ,some in every branch, irrespective of the level of excellence that you maintain.

Auditors usually don’t mingle too much with the ‘local’ guys.They are a class apart and they maintain such air of dignity and decorum around them.They only talk with senior most people like branch/operations heads.

They write comments about the branch after checking every voucher,challan,service request file,locker registries,etcetera etcetera.With the advent of digitisation of maintainence of such registries ,all that they have to do is cross check with the physical and digital entries and there you go,they have the opportunity of easily catching you red handed. 

But our auditing was due for months.Last done during demonetization period.So when the auditor came,the entire ops team felt naturally nervous about what would be our auditing like.

But the moment he came inside the branch and sat inside the b.h cabin,he called our team,introduced himself and said “Look! I know you people were not trained to be professional bankers like we were and that your major concentration is marketing and sales even though you are the ops team.So I won’t be drilling you as such like other auditors about negotiable instruments act and so on.All I expect is a basic level of compliance and cooperation.Thank you!”

We were really astounded.We didn’t expect this.He was a man who understood realities of current day private retail branch banking for he was a branch head himself before he moved to auditing.

Hailing from Kerala,he spoke Tamil in rich Mammootty -ish Malayalam accent with a deep tone,only relevant to people from Gods own country.

For four days of the auditing,he mixed like water with the branch and we never felt uncomfortable that auditor is inside and so on.He occasionally inspected the proceedings of the branch and jotted down certain points in his notepad.Later in the evenings,he furiously wrote mails in his laptop.The occasional ringing of “Thodakkam Mangalyam” from Bangalore days disrupted his workaholic day.

In the third and fourth days,he asked various questions to us (the ops team),checking our awareness of topics like strengths of the bank,concepts like smshing,etcetera.

He personally advised me to aim higher and not to stay as such in retail banking and write jaiib.

Last day,he made us all to sit in a meeting and politely told us of our collective strengths and weaknesses in a tone so passionate about the bank and possible areas of risks.

It was an incredible learning experience.His tone,body language,appearance,everything reminded me of Mammooka.He left a positive footprint with our branch.Now we then had the air that we can breathe easy for atleast an year.