Associate, Business Control & Risk Management-FLOD RCSA QC

Associate, Business Control & Risk Management-FLOD RCSA QC

Country: United States of America

The First Line of Defense (“FLOD”) Quality Control (“QC”) function is a shared services program owned and managed by the Chief Data Office (“CDO”). The Associate, Business Control & Risk Management, operates within the First Line of Defense (FLOD) and is accountable to assist the Business Control & Risk Management team in driving effective and consistent business line execution against the Enterprise Risk Management Framework. The team provides an independent assurance on the risk and control environment towards meeting applicable laws, regulations, and guidelines for business lines across Santander. The goal of the Testing team is to support compliance with regulations and requirements including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), facilitate the assessment of the control suite effectiveness in the Risk and Control Self-Assessment (RCSA) process and inform managers on the adequacy or effectiveness of their control environment. The Associate joins a team that works to ensure that SBNAs issue management and RCSA programs are complying to the relevant standards. The primary responsibility of the team is to build and execute a quality control and challenge function RCSA framework within FLOD for SBNA.

Essential Functions/Responsibilities:
Issue Identification, Management, and Risk Assessment: Conduct RCSA responsibilities including Process Mapping, Risk & Control Matrices, Inherent Risk Assessments, Internal Control testing and Heracles data/input. Engage and hold Business Line process owners accountable to identify and assess risks. Support Business Lines in risk identification (e.g., NPBA, change management, etc.) Ensure all issues (Self-Identified, IA, Credit Risk Review or Regulatory) pertaining to the Business Line are resolved within established timelines. Validate issues to ensure Business Line remediation is sufficient to address root cause and prevent recurrence. 

• Support implementation of a Quality Control (QC) program to validate compliance of issue management & RCSA programs to relevant standards and ensuring accuracy of data in the system of record. The monthly QC program is expected to include (but not limited to):

•  Assessing accurate and effective issue management and reporting throughout the lifecycle of an issue. Assessing issues’ broader impact considerations are properly evidenced and appropriate rating classification changes due to errors and without adequate support. 

• Monitoring complete and accurate issue descriptions and root cause analysis, adequate triage processes where stakeholder involvement and their decisions are sufficiently documented

• Assessing process identification and prioritization used to determine the priority in which RCSA activities will be executed across the subsidiaries.

• Validation of process prioritization and assignment of ratings to each factor based on rating definitions.

• Review of Process maps to ensure critical/high risks are captured and associated key controls at the location on the map where the risk or control exists in the process, including the identification of hand-offs to other processes across the organization.

• Utilizing documented process maps or process walkthroughs, identify/confirm risks, including those that align to a regulation associated with the activities in the process, along with the associated controls and tests.

• Assessing adequate rationale documented to support the inherent risk rationales (IRR), along with any assumptions taken into consideration when calculating the impact.

• Review the Control Suite Effectiveness (CSE) rating justification and verify if all factors were considered in the CSE rating as applicable: Control assessments, Action Drivers, Events, KRI breaches, missing controls, Compensating/non-key controls

• Review various business processes and assess the adequacy of controls designed to mitigate the risks identified.

• Draft and execute test procedures to assess operating effectiveness of controls for in scope RCSA processes.

• Obtain, examine, and analyze records from various systems, reports, operating practices, and documentation for compliance with bank policies, regulatory compliance, and adherence to appropriate procedures. 

• As part of controls testing, analyze for process deficiencies for in scope RCSA process.

• Ensure proper utilization of bank policies and line of business procedures. 

• Collect, document, and summarize results for the Business Unit, and present findings to line or business manager

• Support the FLOD QC Director to identify, develop and document corrective action plans, for noted trends or deficiencies