How the MarketAxess IA Team Builds Stakeholder Relationships Remotely

“Kimberly Antifave: I think it will change in the long term. We’ve had discussions internally in town halls about what the new normal will look like when we come back to work. The first part of that is the “when” — we don’t know when that’s going to happen, but what we do know is that it’s not going to look the same as it was before.”

“Kimberly Antifave: With people that we don’t have as much contact with anymore, I think it’s very important to keep that dialogue open and just give people an opportunity to chat. Even if we get off topic, you want to build those relationships and keep that dialogue open. I think in this environment, it’s really important to make sure people are all on the same page. If something has changed in the audit plan from a technology perspective, even if I’m not doing a technology audit, it may be integrated with something else I’m doing. If I can’t just talk to someone next door to me, I won’t know that. So we’ve definitely made a conscious effort to continue communication, whether it be setting up weekly meetings or a process with people where we say, “Hey, I’ll probably just reach out to you once a week. Is that fine?””

“Kimberly Antifave: We’re about 600 employees now, but growing very fast. Just a few years ago we split out the second and third lines of defense. We now have separate risk and audit departments, and that’s enabled us to educate the firm on what audit does because the department didn’t exist before. A lot of times we’re going into scoping meetings or planning meetings with auditees that we’ve never audited before, and they’re saying, “Who are you? What do you do?” It’s a perfect opportunity for us to explain what we’re doing, why we’re there, and at the same time, how we can help them and how we can create that partnership. Then it becomes more of a Q&A and an open dialogue from the beginning. I think that’s one thing that’s really helped us, splitting out those departments and initially having that training conversation.”

“Kimberly Antifave: I use AuditBoard quite a lot. We started with the SOX module, which was a huge win for us. It was very quick to implement. We had a 200 control set, and we were previously doing everything on Excel. I was part of that implementation, and it went so smoothly and so quickly that I was able to get business owners on the software and using it on a daily basis almost right away — so that was very helpful. We also use OpsAudit to perform all of our audits, and we’re going to be using the RiskOversight platform as well. All of those things have cut down the administrative time by hundreds of hours. I can’t tell you how much time it saved me even just in updating things — I don’t have to anymore because they automatically update.”

“Kimberly Antifave: I do think working for a FinTech company helps because technology is ever changing, and it’s definitely not going away in that environment. I think people understand it and can digest it easier. Also, the way we were doing it before, through email and spreadsheets, wasn’t favorable for anyone. Automatically when we were able to put in the software, the first few times someone got an email, they would ask “Hey, what’s this?” and I’d say, “Just click on that one link and you’ll see.” As soon as they did it, it was so easy and user friendly that it really didn’t take a lot of trying to get people on board — they were already on board. It was very easy to do that, and now we’ve got, I think, 178 owners on the platform even outside of audit because we’ve been sending surveys and certifications as well… AuditBoard really has been something that we haven’t had to spend a lot of time training, since it’s been very intuitive and people have picked it up right away.”

“Kimberly Antifave: I would do it yesterday if I could just because it did save so much time… For me, I think that the easy part was going to the executives with a clear picture in my mind of how it would help us and how it would engage people. It was less of a financial cost situation for us and more of the qualitative factors of the relationships that we can build, the amount of things we can do in the software, like sending out surveys and engaging some of our executive management that before we were engaging in email — and, actually, the security of doing it outside of email.”