Amandeep Rehlon
Project Analyst,
Payment Systems Oversight Team, Financial Stability
How does your work support the Bank’s core purposes?
I work in the Bank’s Payment Systems Oversight team which feeds into the financial stability core purpose. The team oversees payment systems such as the Real Time Gross Settlement system for making payments between banks and financial institutions and also some of the larger retail systems such as BACS for making payments between individuals and households, and the team oversees them to ensure they are robust and resilient and work effectively to ensure the smooth transfer of money across the financial system. The Bank has been doing that for a number of years now and after the Banking Act was passed in 2009, that is now a statutory function for the Bank.
What does your department do?
The Financial Stability directorate covers a number of areas including risk assessment, so looking at the risks that might be developing both in the UK and internationally for the UK financial system. It includes risk mitigation, so for example the Payment Systems Oversight area – where I work – to try and manage or reduce some of those risks, and there’s also the Special Resolution Unit which was developed through the Banking Act 2009 to help deal with institutions that find themselves in difficulty.
Tell us about your career with the Bank so far.
I joined the Bank in the Internal Audit division in September 2004 after training as an accountant for three years, and it was a very good way of getting to see different parts of the Bank. And one of the parts of the Bank that I really liked the look of was Financial Stability so I moved there in 2006, first in the Financial Crisis Management area and now in the Payment Systems Oversight team. And it’s quite a good example of the way you can move around different jobs within the Bank. Obviously taking skills you have with you, so for example I had good processing and analytical skills, but the Bank will also give you the opportunity to try something new, and give you the chance to develop in a completely different area.
At the moment, I’m working on a project to implement part of the Banking Act which was passed earlier in 2009, so I work on the bit that implements Payment Systems Oversight, which the Bank has been doing for a number of years, but is now a statutory function, and also has a number of powers to accompany it. And that’s quite a varied role because it involves, obviously, the legal aspects of it, it involves the policy work, it involves putting appropriate processes in place, so we discharge and govern our duties properly. It’s also good because it’s a way to look back at what the banker used to do in the days of Banking Supervision, so it’s a little bit of a history lesson too.
What makes the Bank a special place to work?
I think the Bank’s a very good place to work because, I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but genuinely the people are really nice and really friendly, as well as being really smart and really into what they do. They’re always willing to give you the time of day to talk to you about what they do and they have a kind of enthusiasm to tell you about it as well.