Sandra Lancaster Email & Phone Number

Knutsford, England, United Kingdom

Controls Business Partner supporting Barclays UK Transformation

Knutsford, Cheshire

• Responsible for collating and managing the overall plan of key milestones required to achieve technology global resiliency in line with regulatory deadlines. Key achievements:
• Collation and baseline of milestones for production crossover (PCO) events for ~300 key group applications and utilities, based on resilience category, aligning to CMDB golden source. Ongoing stakeholder engagement
• Implemented change governance process ensuring CIO approval of adverse date changes
• Developed and agreed an operating model for a programme of monthly grouped PCO orchestrated events

Knutsford, Cheshire

• Change Lead supporting major mainframe resiliency test events in Barclays' key UK data centres, to meet regulatory requirements.Key responsibilities:
• Implementing and leading the governance process for the event "change blackout" periods, engaging with key stakeholders across the Bank, ensuring any change records raised within the period are fully assessed and.
• Overseeing the completeness and timeliness of change records raised by the Mainframe Resiliency Programme to support the resiliency test events

Knutsford, Cheshire

• Change Lead supporting the delivery of technology changes across the Bank’s applications to ensure compliance with the UK Banking Industry Ringfencing regulatory requirements. The "Split the Bank" technology programme.
• Led the end to end process for incremental technical scope change requests: (a) initial discussions with senior architects to ensure change understood and agreed (b) ensured all relevant business-aligned workstreams.
• Managed planning change requests to ensure integrity of the overall technology programme plan (6000+ milestones), including alignment to test and release plans, inter-programme dependencies agreed
• Managed the master list of ~400 applications in scope of technical change, ensuring traceability to high level designs and milestones in programme plan

Manchester, United Kingdom

• Led the Balance Sheet Integrity (BSI) team: oversight of the attestation of 400k balance sheet account lines, £300tn gross balances across products/functions. Key achievements:
• Managed a project to develop and implement a substantiation and reconciliation governance framework. Incorporated roll out of (a) mandatory training of ~300 staff, (b) monthly senior management supervisory review and.
• Developed and agreed a business wide substantiation and reconciliation delegated control, to ensure consistent standards and policy compliance
• Drove operational process and control improvements, including elimination of manual and duplicated processes, improved handoff.

Knutsford, Cheshire And London

• As Finance business owner, responsible for implementing new/enhanced governance and control applications.Key achievements:
• Successfully rolled out a project to build a new in-house general ledger control attestation application across Barclays global businesses (project cost £7m over 4 years):(a) Developed and agreed the business and non.
• Smoothly implemented a new in-house application to control and track the end to end preparation and submission of the statutory accounts for Barclays' 800 global subsidiaries

Knutsford, Cheshire And London

• Responsible for monitoring and reporting financial reporting risk and implementing improved governance arrangements. Key achievements:
• Set up operating model, agreed Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) and implemented monthly/quarterly financial reporting risk oversight monitoring and reporting
• Monthly reporting to RBB CFO: included KRIs monitoring, tracking resolution of key control issues (SOX and others) and audit findings, financial policy compliance and dispensations. Quarterly reporting to RBB CEO
• Launched pan RBB delegated authorities and travel and expenses policy, plus mandatory travel approval tool and supporting process. Resulted in improved cost control (£33m travel budget) and minimised spend “leakage”
• Recruited and led offshore conformance assurance team (5 FTE). Led on-site financial reporting conformance assurance reviews across 11 businesses in Africa, the UK and Europe

Knutsford, Cheshire And London

• Responsible for developing and embedding good financial governance, to support SOX compliance. Success was confirmed via an “Eagle” staff recognition award, whilst combining this role with the pension fund trustee.
• Developed delegated authorities, cascaded to 60,000 UK staff and set up and coordinated ongoing BAU process
• Reviewed all key financial reporting process models (EUDAs), ensuring compliance with Group Model Risk policy
• Implemented a new reporting module on the group SAP ledger to provide journal listings to meet external audit requirements, along with a monthly conformance assurance process
• Reviewed and coordinated the financial aspects of a group wide Deloitte compliance audit of Microsoft software licences, covering 50,000 desktops, £3m compliance cost

Knutsford, Cheshire And London

Member nominated director of the corporate trustee of the Barclays Bank UK Retirement Fund: £20bn+ assets and 250,000 scheme members.

Chartered Accountant

Bachelor Of Accountancy