Samuel Harmsworth

The promotion from Compliance Analyst for over-achieving within that role allowed me to build on my Compliance Monitoring and data skills, whilst also developing into new areas such as people and senior stakeholder management. My responsibilities and achievements currently include:

• Developing the annual Compliance Monitoring Plan (CMP), balancing internal risk indicators, recently completed assurance, and external expectations, to prioritise areas requiring assurance;
• Leading end to end on Compliance Monitoring reviews independently from fact finds to fieldwork and finally to close-out meetings with senior stakeholders to validate findings and, most importantly, agree actions - an exercise in negotiation given that the business is already stretched thin due to an ongoing Transformation project;
• Managing team progress through Excel trackers and automatically updating Power Bi dashboards across Compliance functions (e.g. advisory, monitoring);
• Managing and up-skilling a Graduate in both Data and Compliance through training plans, 1:1s and daily support (Enabling and encouraging colleague development has been very rewarding);
• Producing Powerpoint slides to committees and forums, summarising key Compliance risks within Together;
• Supporting and up-skilling Compliance colleagues as a Data expert (e.g. teaching Power Bi and SQL skills, boosting assurance reviews by using data for risk-based sampling, insights, data-led testing and continuous monitoring).

As a Compliance Analyst, I threw myself into this Data / Compliance hybrid role, paving the way for using data for assurance within the Group Risk function. During my time in this role, my achievements included:

• Trialling using data-led methodology to provide assurance of compliance with FCA regulations;
• Implementing risk-based sampling within the Compliance function;
• Integrating regularly-updated dashboards to provide MI on progress against the Compliance Monitoring Plan (CMP);
• Aligning and improving assurance actions tracking across Group Risk;
• Enhancing Risk and Control Self-Assessments (RCSAs) so that the business can manage risk more effectively;
• Up-skilling myself to became a Compliance SME;
• Leading Compliance Monitoring reviews as per the Compliance Monitoring Plan (CMP); and
• Producing hard-hitting, meaningful reports to drive change.

As a Data Analyst for a global company my role is to provide information to country directors and team leaders, through querying the raw data in an SQL database and publishing interactive reports on Tableau. This role covers a wide range of responsibilities including:

• Producing and distributing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Telesales and Account Management agents, allowing for performance-based commission payments, as well as calculating KPIs for higher-level company-wide performance;
• Documenting business logic and processes;
• Maintaining routine weekly and end of month reports used across the company;
• Seeking answers in the data to ad-hoc queries from stakeholders, often to tight deadlines by using efficient SQL coding;
• Keeping up to date with Tableau and SQL best practices, as well as shifts the business as it develops;
• Working with the Data Management team to ensure that the necessary data is ready and available for analysis;
• Cooperating with Marketing to ensure that engagement campaigns and their impact are monitored and data-driven;
• Producing a wide range of reports for both Management Information (MI) and Operational purposes.

As Data Management Analyst, I gained fantastic experience being an integral part of a project aiming to unify and cleanse data sources for the benefit of analysis. I was responsible for building the foundations of this new platform, configuring data processes, understanding business requirements and iteratively improving the platform as demands evolved. I have flourished in this data journey and I feel confident that I now have the transferable skills required to transition to a new career, either in data or elsewhere. My responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Bringing data together from multiple sources, funnelling it through a production line of Data Quality, Pseudonymisation and Data Standardisation, and making it available to analysts throughout the business to inform business-wide decisions;
• Data analysis using a range of software (such as Excel, Access, SQL Server 2018 and Databricks);
• Ensuring that ingested data is of required quality, user-friendly and can be utilised by analysts throughout the business;
• Creating and refining the data processes by thinking outside the box and applying Six Sigma concepts;
• Producing Management Information (MI) to show progress via slick Power Bi dashboards;
• Documenting and cataloguing data (and processes) within a Data Dictionary and on an Azure DevOps wiki so that information reaped is not lost;
• Gatekeeping the Power Bi publishing process to maintain governance and quality for any dashboards published to Power Bi Service;
• Owning the role of Scrum Master and Product Owner to manage teams and drive the project forwards in three-week sprints by using Agile methodologies.