INTERVIEW | Ivan Zammit: Success built on resilience and adaptability

The MFSA’s remit is to monitor and regulate all financial services in Malta. How crucial is your role as Chief Operating Officer in ensuring that this vast operation happens as smoothly and efficiently as possible?

Like any business operation, the Authority needs to ensure that its moving parts are working as efficiently and smoothly as possible. My role as COO is to provide the internal leadership and direction to a number of horizontal functions that cut across the whole organisation, acting as enablers and providing support to the whole organisation.

Together with my colleagues in the Executive Committee, we also ensure that we act as change agents to the transformation that is ongoing within the Authority.

What technological investments has the MFSA made over the past months to ensure that it can carry out its role with the high degree of quality required, especially in a day and age when such investments have become, one must imagine, more and more necessary?

Our technology plan is actually a multi-year investment programme. We’ve started by modernising our IT infrastructure, provided our people with the latest tools and collaboration software, and continued improving our cybersecurity posture. But that’s just the starting point. Moving forward we now need to  continue with our investment programme to ensure more efficient and effective management of the supervisory life cycle – that is, from the application stage, to surrender of licence, and all the ongoing supervisory work in between.  This will ultimately result in more efficient application processing, better communication with licence holders, and improved supervisory effectiveness.

Around a year ago, the MFSA invested its resources into creating a Data Management and Business Intelligence team. Why do you think that this was an important addition to your corporate structure, and what do feel that it has added to your business strategy?

This was a critically important decision in our strategic plan. Data, as you can imagine, is a very valuable asset. You can have the best and brightest people, cutting edge technology, and reengineered processes, but if your data is not there and is not of the highest quality, you are running the risk of making wrong decisions along the way.

That is why the Authority has invested and elevated data management so that it is now a centralised function providing services across the whole organisation, with technology as the underlying enabler, and people as the knowledge-workers making use of that higher-quality data.

Human Resource capacity building across the organisation and investment in technology is aimed at ensuring the long-term sustainability of the financial services sector by strengthening supervisory effectiveness as a critical success factor in any jurisdiction.

How vital do you believe it is to create a certain culture within a company, and an ethos that employees can subscribe to when it comes to fulfilling your company’s mission? How might you go about describing the culture within the MFSA, and what does the Authority do to bring about this homogenous mindset within its employees?

This is a very important question. Organisational culture is essentially what aligns employees’ needs and values to the mission and objectives of an organisation. This is a very important topic for us and for any organisation. If employees do not share the company’s values, it would be very difficult for any organisation to improve its performance year-on-year and to achieve its strategic objectives.

Traditionally the culture at MFSA was rather hierarchical, with the supervisory units managing the different sectors acting as natural silos within the organisation. With the restructuring that we carried out last year and the investment and streamlining of processes towards a harmonised risk-based approach to supervision, this is now something of the past. Today, teams work effectively across functions, as we continue our journey towards a more harmonised approach to risk-based supervision.

One of your duties as COO is to overlook the MFSA’s Programme Management team, whose function, to put it simply, is to see that all key initiatives within the firm come to fruition. How important do you think this framework has been in ensuring that the MFSA completes all the ambitious projects that it sets itself every year?

Much like any business needs to orchestrate workflows and processes and ensure a smooth operation vis-à-vis the customers that it handles, we also need to ensure a high level of business orchestration when it comes to managing change, and programme management is crucial when it comes to implementing change through many enterprise-wide initiatives in flight at any point in time.

Several major projects are ongoing. This function plays a very important role in ensuring efficient project management and the streamlining of new processes across the organisation, such that we are successful with this transformation.

To conclude on a more topical note, what were the challenges provided by the Covid-19 pandemic over the past months in relation to the day-to-day running of your operations? Has the Authority taken any specific measures in the face of this outbreak?

Like many other organisations, most of our employees needed to work from home. Enterprise mobility was one of the deliverables of the MFSA’s technology investment plan which the Authority had already started implementing in 2019, therefore when COVID-19 started we were prepared. While we had the technology and the processes in place to implement this, it still did bring about some challenges of course, because the nature of the Authority is to supervise licence holders, that traditionally used to happen face-to-face, on-site at the licence holders’ premises.

Nevertheless, I’m proud to say that our employees rose to the occasion. We changed the way we do things in terms of supervision so that this could continue remotely, and in fact, we’re proud to say that we have not stopped our operations at all throughout this whole pandemic.

Resilience and adaptability are critical success factors for overcoming unforeseen challenges. The handling of the pandemic vis-à-vis our operation was no exception. COVID-19 gave us the impetus to test work practices, such as significantly extended remote working and remote supervisory work with our licence holders, through modern online collaboration tools we would have possibly not explored to such an extent in the short term. It was not only a successful litmus test for the Authority in terms of implementing alternative work arrangements that improve our employees’ work-life balance moving forward, but it also proved the mettle of our workforce as employees embraced new business processes in record time to continue serving the industry.