A Career in RRP- What you need to know about Restoring Trust and Building Resilience
In this edition we speak with Simon Mew, former Managing Director, Head Recovery & Resolution Planning, Treasury at Standard Chartered Bank (SCB). Simon is a qualified accountant who started his career in external audit before accepting a role at SCB where he has held a variety of senior roles throughout the last 20 years, including: executive assistant to the Group CFO during the financial crisis; Head of debt investor and rating agency relationships; Regional Treasurer for the Western Hemisphere and most recently Head of Recovery and Resolution Planning (RRP).
What prompted your move into treasury and RRP?
It started as an interest in post financial crisis regulation and how the group planned to respond to that in terms of communicating with its external stakeholders and managing its balance sheet in the most effective way possible. This soon developed into an awareness of RRP. I saw RRP as a challenge – the chance to own one particular (but wide-reaching and important) deliverable for the group and deliver on it in the most efficient way possible.
What does a typical day in RRP look like?
It’s fair to say there is no typical day in RRP. Both the recovery and resolution teams will be working on an annual and biennial cycle of improvements, respectively, with the aim of improving the firms’ recoverability and resolvability. These improvements could range from making the firms crisis management framework more effective by running a scenario based exercise, to researching and assessing if there are any incremental capital or liquidity generating actions that could be deployed in the event of a stress. And, of course, if there is a stress then the teams’ priorities will shift towards supporting senior management.
How does the current financial instability impact RRP teams?
RRP teams will be at the heart of the firms response to the current situation – providing information and analysis to central crisis management committees (which would have been stood up in this kind of climate) so they can react to the situation as it unfolds. That information can include everything from insights into current market indicators (both idiosyncratic and market-wide) to what the banks deposit base and client interactions might be signalling.
What transferable skills can help a candidate move from treasury into RRP?
RRP teams will always be on the look out for technical skills or experience that might be lacking in the current team, a good example would be stress-testing given that gives you a really good understanding of a how a banks balance sheet and income statement perform under stress, another would be demonstrable experience of interpreting, communicating on and overseeing delivery on prudential regulation. In terms of softer skills, the ability to communicate and influence senior stakeholders outside of your team or function would rank highly given RRP teams will regularly interact with business and function heads in order to secure buy-in and delivery on items targeted for development.
How does an RRP role evolve?
RRP, like any regulation, evolves all the time. Teams are continually responding to feedback from regulators’ or internal stakeholders’, with a view to ensuring that they are prepared for all eventualities. Moving forward, we can expect to see changes to existing regulation driven by regulators’ learnings and just as importantly an increase in managements’ awareness and desire to be prepared for rapidly evolving situations.
How has RRP made you a more seasoned treasury professional?
I’d run projects before, but managing a cross-bank project like RRP with such sizable deliverables for regulators has given me the chance to expand my project management skills. It has also given me a greater appreciation of the full scope of risks run by banks and how banks manage them. For example, I now have a much better understanding of how banks manage continuity in their operations both in business as usual and in crisis.
What should candidates think about before moving from treasury into RRP?
First of all, it is important to be clear on what you will (and won’t) be doing in RRP i.e. where the RRP role ends and other subject matter experts or process owners take over. For instance, it’s unlikely that you will be doing the liquidity or capital modelling upon which RRP relies but you will need to understand and interpret it. If you want a broad view across a firm then a RRP role may well be the right move for you, given you will get visibility of how a firm manages financial and non-financial risks and the actions it (and the regulator/ resolution authority) might take to address them in a crisis. This in turn means that you are likely to develop a broader cross firm network than if you were in a particular risk vertical within treasury but also requires candidates to possess very good communication and influencing skills.
Where can candidates go after a role in RRP?
Looking at the people I’ve worked with, some have moved outside of treasury and gone into second line risk or compliance roles (e.g. country CRO or prudential risk) and some have moved into finance roles (e.g. FP&A and stress testing). But there are also opportunities to stay within treasury and I have seen people move into liquidity and capital management roles too.
How do you see the RRP landscape evolving in the coming 12/24 months?
Aside from the immediate focus of supporting senior management navigating the current situation, RRP teams will be working on well-understood pieces of work to address external and internal feedback to improve the firms’ recoverability and resolvability. Going forward, I expect regulators and firms to examine what lessons they can learn from the current situation, ultimately adding to the body of work already in the pipeline. The lessons to be learnt are likely to revolve around reassessing the criticality of firms and the services they provide to the economy, the thresholds at which recovery, resolution planning and or course stress testing bite and reminding us all of the value of testing our crisis management plans, given how quickly things can unfold.
