Awards case study: Pillars of Progress

“Audit Wants You” – this is the key message sent out by Santander’s internal audit team in its search for the best recruits to help ensure the team is fit to face all the challenges of the present and the future. Externally, they have also been active, looking for people with a more diverse range of backgrounds and promising opportunities, experiences and qualifications once they start.

Fernando Revuelta joined the bank as chief internal auditor six years ago and knew from the start that he wanted to enhance the breadth and performance of the function. Attracting new internal auditors was an important part of this and the team has grown physically from about 90 people to around 150. However this was just part of more fundamental changes.

“All the banks were increasing the size of their internal audit functions in 2014, but I was just as anxious to boost our skills and enhance the overall quality of the function and of what we do,” Revuelta explains. “The key to all successful internal audit departments is their people – their motivation and development and the quality of their managers.”

He also wanted to reassess the composition of the department – to reduce the ratio of managers to auditors and increase the number of those with particular skills – and to increase the team’s motivation. “Once you have the right levels of motivation, people will progress quickly when they are given the necessary training and support, but you need the motivation first,” he explains.

In addition, the team needed to be more “nimble” he adds. At the time, the function was already looking at its methodology and at ways to integrate audit work and collaborate more effectively. It was obvious that it was
essential to increase their use of data analytics and enable more whole-population testing. These changes dovetailed neatly – the improved data analytics enabled them to adapt their methodology, and finding the right people to build the team was a clear next step.

This was why, in 2019, Revuelta and his team officially launched the internal audit Assuring the Future programme. It was designed to consolidate the gains they had already made in a system designed to attract the best people and train existing and new staff with the skills they would need to take the function forward.

Nurture, adapt, transform

The programme was based around three core “pillars”: nurture, adapt and transform. The nurture pillar included a graduate and apprenticeship programme designed to attract and train new auditors from diverse backgrounds.

Trainees are rotated around the function in their first 12 months to gain a thorough understanding of the business and of internal auditing before they specialise. Professional qualifications are supported by additional behavioural training and access to a residential leadership academy and international secondment programmes.

Revuelta was keen to attract good applicants from within the business as well as from outside, so the team also launched an “Audit Wants You” campaign, explaining what the function does and what the opportunities for the right candidates would be.

“When we launched the campaign we were aware that not many people knew what internal audit does, so our main objective was to raise awareness and share with colleagues in the bank what we do and how and why this helps the business,” he says. “There are three elements to our basic training in internal audit – IIA training is core because it gives a solid grounding in the subject and then there are technical skills such as IT, capital, modelling, data management and cyber security. The third element is soft skills and our residential leadership academy plays a key part in developing these.”

Progression to higher levels is an important incentive. Revuelta points out that becoming a senior internal auditor involves demonstrating your ability to face challenges, deal with people effectively and manage them. Team leaders must be able to show junior staff how to behave in front of senior management and with auditees and managers across the business. It is just as important to be able to behave as a leader elsewhere in the organisation as it is within your own team, he adds.

The results have been significant: “A more transparent career path, improved training opportunities and greater recognition has created a highly motivated and diverse workforce,” Revuelta explains. “I am particularly proud to see many people from other areas of the bank choosing internal audit as their new professional home through our ‘Audit Wants You’ programme.”

When it comes to adapting and transforming the function, the team has seen notable successes from its work on emerging risks, such as climate change, artificial intelligence and blockchain. It has been working more closely with customers within the business to help them understand and mitigate the risks of the future and has helped to provide new insights to colleagues in other areas, such as sustainability.

This has not gone unnoticed. The head of collections and recoveries, transformation and strategy, at Santander wrote: “I would like to thank you and your staff for the fantastic support. I have been struck by the intent of your department to do the right thing in a way that is both fundamentally correct to the principles of audit, but also by your collaborative execution, which undoubtedly shows that you clearly care about doing the right thing for both the customer and the business.”

Assuring the future

Assuring the future is now a major theme. “Last year we were looking at the internal audit framework and one of the key areas that came up was risk assessment. We wanted to develop the way we identify risks, and factor the key elements that make our business work into our routine risk assessment processes in a new way,” Revuelta says. “We created our own dashboard based on these elements and re-examined all our current audits and emerging risks against this.”

Ensuring that the team has the right skills for the future is fundamental. In particular, all internal auditors must be familiar with, and willing to work with, data, Revuelta stresses. His team has a specialist data analytics team within it, but he argues that it is even more important to ensure that all auditors are able to work with databases and utilise the availability of data.

“Basic tools such as Excel are now much more powerful and, as long as your organisation has collected the data and you have access to it, you can achieve far more with these than in the past,” he says. “It’s far more effective to have everyone using these as a basic requirement, than to have a few people doing very interesting specialist things with data, even though this can also be important.”

Improved morale in the team and a stronger understanding of what it does in the business has already increased the team’s reputation internally. Winning the A&R award was the icing on the cake and, Revuelta says, gained attention not just in the UK, but worldwide.

“Everyone in the team has been congratulated personally by senior management and by the audit committee and board and we received lots of other compliments from contacts around the world, including our group chair of the board,” he says. “We’d already had reassurance from an external quality assessment and from the audit committee that we were doing well, but this was wonderful public confirmation of success.”

When applicants approach Revuelta for a job, he says he looks most for those who are prepared to make a personal effort and are eager to learn and develop. “I interview many people and I look at how they articulate their views, whether they are mature in the way they think about things and want to learn more, because they will have lots of chances if they join us – in April, I delivered 40 promotion letters,” he says. “You can teach skills, but you can’t teach this attitude.”

External feedback within the bank has also improved, but Revuelta is aware that the team has to be seen to add genuine value. “In the end we don’t increase revenue, so we have to show what we do to add value,” he says. “This award is not just for me and my team, it’s for the whole of Santander. It shows that we are important for the whole organisation and helps us to be respected.” 

Nominations for the Audit & Risk Awards 2020 will open in October. For more information, see page 24.

This article was first published in September 2020.