The evolving role of compliance: Insights on growth and innovation

In this episode of the Inspiring Voices podcast, Surabhi Marwah, Partner, People Advisory Services, and Private Client Services Co-Leader, EY India, speaks with Piya Haldar, DESIG the Chief Compliance Officer at Honeywell India on the changing role of compliance. Piya talks about her professional and personal journey, the challenges she faced, and her passion for promoting diverse talent. Piya shares insights on her transformative projects at Honeywell, the importance of networking and mentorship for women, and her views on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I).

Key takeaways

The role of a Chief Compliance Officer is to enable a business to grow while being compliant. To do this, it is important to be visible and transformative.
The transformative use of data for predictive analysis and real-time monitoring is increasingly being used in compliance as organizations develop AI tools.
Taking risk, networking and building one's brand can be important to explore opportunities outside of comfort zone and grow professionally.
Mentorship and sponsors play a large role in guiding and supporting women professionals to achieve greater heights.

Women should go out and network. Building your own network and your own brand is extremely important.

Priya Haldar

Chief Compliance Officer, Honeywell India

Be ready with your elevator pitches. If you see someone senior coming, be ready. Do not shy away and pretend to be on your phone. Use the opportunity.

Surabhi Marwah

Partner, People Advisory Services, and Private Client Services Co-Leader, EY India

For your convenience, a full text transcript of this podcast is available on the link below:

Surabhi Marwah: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Inspiring Voices. My name is Surabhi Marwah. I am a Partner, People Advisory Services, and Private Client Services Co-Leader, EY India. But today is not about me. We have a very special guest with us today. Before I give her name, let me just talk to you about her accolades. She is a chief compliance officer. But not an ordinary one.

She has been recognized as one of the top 30 chief compliance officers by Startup Times. She is also co-chair with AMCHAM for the Ethics Committee. She also leads a large number of functions within Honeywell India. Welcome to the show, Piya Haldar.

Piya Haldar: Thank you. Thanks, Surabhi.

Surabhi Marwah: And this is, this is our celebrity moment. It is our version of Koffee with Karan.

Or I will call it Koffee with Piya. But the coffee cups are missing. We can have imaginary coffee.

Piya Haldar: Absolutely. And thank you for having me here. It is a pleasure.

Surabhi Marwah: Today is going to be about your journey. It is about inspiring voices, women who have done very well in leadership roles. When I was coming up the ranks, I was always interested in understanding the journey.

It is not only about the professional journey, but the personal journey as well. And I am sure it is full of lots of challenges, lots of ifs and buts and questions. Why this? Why not this? Should I be here or should I be there? So, a couple of minutes, of your precious time to take us through your journey, personal and professional.

Young people who are watching this would probably like a lot of tips on how to become great professionals. You and I both have children who are the age where they never want to listen to us, but maybe with this they can switch on the channels and say, maybe our mothers are going to be making sense this time.

Piya, so let me start with the other person behind the professional. What are your interests in life? Tell us a bit about the personal journey.

Piya Haldar: Surabhi, again, thank you to you and to EY for giving me this opportunity. This is something which is very close to my heart -- talking about leadership and the struggles that we have as women go through to reach the levels that we have reached. And it is not been easy. As we all know. But, when I start off any of this, I usually say that the journey has been quite boring.

But there have been a lot of things which have been extraordinary. I was born and brought up in Bengaluru and have lived in Delhi for the longest period now. I have been with Honeywell for a very long time. That is where I found my moment as well as ground.

I will come to the organization in a bit. As you rightly said, kids and spouse and, often across countries and across cities. So, yes, one has to manage all that. And I love what I do. I want to dabble in more things and and my passion these days is trying to ensure that women and young women leaders have a voice, a voice at the table as well as a voice in leadership roles that they are aiming for.

I am also part of the IND Council, as we call it, in Honeywell. We are trying to do a lot of activities to ensure many things within the organization as well as outside. I will talk about things that I do outside, but within the organization also, we are trying to do a lot of activities to ensure that we are promoting diverse talent. But I would call diverse as women talent.

Surabhi Marwah: That is a brilliant journey and I love the bit about ‘boring’. We are a cricket crazy nation. And whenever I am scrolling on Insta, I see this post with Anushka Sharma saying, “I am very boring. I eat the same food five days in a row and I sleep by 9:30.” They are the power couple (cricketer Virat Kohli and actor Anushka Sharma) of boring. So, maybe that that is the most interesting thing! You have had a tremendous journey and we were speaking about it outside as well.

Compliance is a difficult role. Being a Chief Compliance Officer means you need to be visible. You need to be on the right side of everyone and on the law, and also be transformative because you cannot just be by the book. It just does not work. At Honeywell, you must have taken on some very transformative projects or may have had some very big challenges. And compliance would mean you are dealing with the C-suite. You have to make sure everything is correct. Tell us a little bit about that. You may not be able to give us too many details. But tell me something about how it is worked for you and some specific examples.

Piya Haldar: My getting into compliance itself has been quite an amazing journey. I never started off being a compliance professional like most people would. I am an engineer, a mechanical engineer. I was the only girl in a class of 180 boys. The only one to graduate from that college, in the final year. The first girl, in fact, from mechanical engineering, that year.

I always wanted to do sales and product management, which is what I started off doing. So, I have done the hardcore sales stuff and then I have done product management. Fortunately or unfortunately, some things happen. When my daughter, my second child, was born, I used to work for a very large organization. When I came back from maternity leave, my role had actually vanished. I did not have a role. And I was told that because you were away on maternity leave and we could not have that role empty, the role is gone. So, I had to come back and search for a role. It was either search for a role or go. That was the starting point. That is one of the biggest challenges that working mothers have. You have a four-month-old child at home, and you have come back and you do not have a role. I was told that the only role was in a different city, which would mean that either I took my four-month-old child and went or I could do three days there and two days here. But that would also mean that I would leave.

Surabhi Marwah: That is very hard.

Piya Haldar: That is very hard. That is when I started looking for roles. Luckily, I did find one and it was a compliance role. She (daughter) is 19 years old, and I have been doing compliance now for 19 years. It is been an amazing journey. Sometimes setbacks also help you choose and get to a point where you want to be. Post that it is been compliance.

Coming back to the question that you asked me, honestly, it (compliance officer) is a very challenging role. It requires a lot of resilience and a lot of influencing, because it means that you are working with the C-suite, but it also means that you have to influence them to do the right things.

Surabhi Marwah: And hold your ground and be powerful so that they listen to you.

Piya Haldar: Yes, listen to you and make sense while they are listening to you. At the end of the day, I believe that as a compliance officer, as a governance officer, you have to be an enabler. You have to understand the risk and then help mitigate that. Then, of course, be an enabler for the business to grow. Because I cannot have business not growing by saying it is non-compliant. A couple of things are very transformative that we have started doing. We started using a lot of data. A lot of decisions that we take are data driven.

Surabhi Marwah: So agentic AI, or Generative AI? Are those very important?

Piya Haldar: Yes, and we have tried to develop a couple of models. What we are trying to do is a lot of predictive analysis. What it helps us with is identifying risks beforehand.

For example, if I am looking at someone's travel and expenses, and I am able to draw out a pattern, I am able to draw out behavioral aspects. And I know that x, y, z may be a risk for the organization. Then you do the check. We do that.

Then we do the second risk. We funnel the risks using data. From an organization standpoint that has been an absolutely new area. And I am very proud to say that we piloted that in India to some extent. We started off by doing transaction testing, as it is called, and it was a pilot that we said that we will initiate in India.

That is something which is absolutely transformative. We are one of the first few companies who are actually doing it to that level. Most companies have started using data, but we are using extensive data and trying to do a lot of real-time monitoring and stuff like that.

Surabhi Marwah: Are you using all of this which was developed in India?

Piya Haldar: Absolutely, yes.

Surabhi Marwah: That is a great high.

Piya Haldar: What we have managed to do is that in the initial stages, we developed a concept. We call them the alerts, the initial ones. And then it was transported out, globally. It is been very interesting. There has been a lot of learning. From my vantage point, I would run away from data or when I looked at too many numbers. But now that we work with it and we have a team that is developing, it is interesting.
Surabhi Marwah: You made data your best friend.

Piya Haldar: I am trying to. I still have not reached that point but I am trying to. We are working on that. Which also brings me to the other transformative stuff that we are trying to do. I think most people, most organizations struggle with getting good professionals, compliance professionals. So what we are also trying to do is to see if we can upskill talent that is there.

One of the ways of retaining or upskilling talent is by ensuring that you sort of upskill them in areas of, again, data analytics and/or subject matter, specifics subjects. So that is the other piece that we have started. And we, of course, use EY services for doing that.

In terms of upskilling people, it also helps us and it helps them get up to speed, learn new things. It also helps the organization to get the best as well as retain.

Surabhi Marwah: Now you must be thanking the person who gave away your role because you have done exceptionally well and you found your mojo. I am a great believer in destiny. God has plans. I can just imagine you 19 years ago with a little child saying, ‘Oh, my God! I have two kids and I might be losing my job.’ It is a scary feeling for a person, especially a woman who has very ambitious but also wants to have a family. At any stage of life, in any country, I think we still grapple with that. Your example is absolutely great to know, and I am sure your daughter is going to love it when she hears this.

I also think that in reskilling as well, your own example is great because as a mechanical engineer, typically, you could be at a shop floor, going by education. But you totally pivoted. Reskilling has become the mantra of everything. You look at any interviews, reskilling (is there) because of AI, because of everything.

But 20 years ago or 19 years ago, this word was not known. You got the same job depending upon your last two jobs. It would have taken a lot of guts (to change) and you had to be good at what you did, because that is how what you (grew). You have had a great career and the transformation journeys are amazing.

I am going to pivot. You talked a little bit about DE&I. When I was told to do this podcast with you, like any of us, I went on LinkedIn as I wanted to read about you. I saw this post about DE&I and some statistics, which I am going to let you say, like 12 trillion, etc. What really captured my attention was not just a BAU (business as usual) article on DE&I and work life balance, but also about bold action saying, look, we have got to take some steps.

Now that I hear your story, and we were talking outside also, I can understand where that passion is coming from because you have been there and done that. You are not just speaking from the book. So, tell me, what do you see in Honeywell? In what ways and where have you contributed? As a woman leader who has probably been reading, been on panels, what do you think we need to do? What are the real steps? And I want you to please go beyond what we hear on interviews because I lead a part of DE&I for EY as well and I see a lot of people saying, we have heard this; you do these panels, but you do not know the reality of it.

What is the reality and how can we help and guide young women and men to change?

Piya Haldar: It is not specific to an organization, not specific to Honeywell or anything. As a woman, I would say a couple of things. I could have done better in my younger days. As I grew older, that is the advice that I would want to give, whether it is to my daughter or my colleagues or others. First thing is that women should go out and network. I think we often stop ourselves from doing that. I do not know why. Maybe we are shy. Maybe we think we will not fit in. We may not know what to go and say. Networking, and I do not mean networking as in parties, but building your own network and your own brand, I think is extremely important. That is very, very critical.

The second piece, and from which I have benefited, Surabhi, personally is having a mentor and a sponsor in the organization. A mentor who not only guides you with professional stuff but sort of alleys into your personal space as well as your professional space like a sounding board.

Surabhi Marwah: A personal therapist in a way.

Piya Haldar: I will give you a little example about myself. In one of the organizations I worked at, I was extremely comfortable, maybe a little too comfortable. I thought that I would not move out of the organization. Till my mentor actually came and said that if you sit here and continue to work here, you will not grow. So, get up. And that is where I was evaluating an opportunity with Honeywell at one point in time. He said, just get up and go take that role. That is what is going to catapult you. It could have gone both ways, right? I could have just not heard or I could have said, okay. I actually decided to do the latter.

I said, okay, let me take a leap of faith. And it was pretty scary.

Surabhi Marwah: Thank you to that.

Piya Haldar: It was a clean slate. There was nothing. The position was absolutely new. But I did that. And, believe you me, I mean, that was the biggest and the most sensible advice anyone had given me, that take that leap of faith. Everyone is behind you. So I think having that one person or two people to sort of guide you, be the sounding board, I think is extremely important.

The third thing, which I personally feel, is that honestly, I do not want to be a super woman anymore. I see younger women coming and wanting to do everything, wanting to be the best mom. I have a few team members who have small children and they want to do that. Well, they want to excel at work. They want to get top rated. They want to do this. And I am like breathe, breathe. So, my take again is that you do not need to be a super woman in all the areas. Pick and choose what is important at that point in time.

Pick your battles at the right time. Do not jump into everything, wanting to do everything because you burn out and you may not succeed. And from an organization standpoint, I think it is important for any organization to track metrics around diversity, which I think most organizations have started doing now.

Large organizations have started doing. Also hold the male leaders responsible for ensuring that you have diversity in the teams, because unless you hold them accountable, it is not going to happen. So, to that extent, as an organization, we are doing a lot of things. But I think these two things, consciously, every organization has to work on.

Surabhi Marwah: This was like listening to myself. What you said made a lot of sense to me. When I had to go out for meetings, and you will always see that even though the glass ceiling has been broken, will be broken, or has been cracked, they have a sea of males.

And, it is sometimes uncomfortable to go and break that little, circle, even though , my heart says, go for it, go and sit with Piya. But I see, okay, that those are the male members I must go and speak with. And I think that in two minutes you have to do it. And I feel it is also unjustified sometimes because the men will always be with the men.

But it is a part of life and you have to accept it. You have to make your way. So, I understand there are different parts of networking. It is just that you need to be heard. So be ready with your elevator pitches. If you see someone senior coming, be ready. Do not shy away and, say, pretend to be on your phone. Use the opportunity.

I totally agree with you on mentorship. I will also share an example. There are some criteria that there seem to be for men and women. I was doing a panel and a very senior woman (executive) who was a CEO told me, Surabhi, have you noticed that when you do birthdays, celebrations and you would have a team, everybody would sing Happy Birthday, and then the woman would be left to cut the cake. And I looked at her and I said, oh my God, that is so true. And I said, after this, I am never cutting any day. So, you have to break that shift to say, I am making this choice. I want to be an outlier. It is going to be harder for me than for other people, but this is a choice I make. At the end of it, you get a lot of you get power, you get a lot of freedom, you get a lot of self-respect.

My favorite line to people now is that after we have all been professionals for very long, both of us have kids the same age. So, it is about the freedom. It is not about how much you have in the bank or where you reach. It is about the freedom of mind and the confidence that you have. So I always encourage. I do not have a daughter, but for every daughter there, I would say try to be a little bit more brave because luck favors the brave and Piya it is favoured you.

You took a big leap of faith. I have been with you all my life, but I have also taken small leaps of faith and done different things. And I have been very scared. I am sure you would always exude a lot of confidence. But from inside there is always fear.

It is good to talk about that fear with your mentors. You may not want to show it to the world, but it is good to talk about.

Piya Haldar: Absolutely. And just adding on to this example, you and I were talking about it recently. I saw this ad in the paper, which was for a big conference, and you had the who has who of the world.

But what struck me as odd was that there was just one lady’s picture. There must have been at least 20 men who were going to be on the panel, but there was just one woman leader there. So, that that one has to become five and then five has to become ten.

That is where the change will occur.

Surabhi Marwah: It is been brilliant talking to you. But I will ask you for now three top mantras. You have given us lots of mantras for success, but we would like to also see you work very hard during the week.

What are the top three things you would tell women to do? Women with children and families and difficult works commitments. How would you tell them to unwind? What do you do to unwind? And that is my last question to you. Because I also want to see how a powerful lady who works so hard, manages to take out time for herself.

Piya Haldar: I am actually a very bad example of that. But having said that, I am quite a social person, so for me, part of de-stress is meeting people. I like meeting people, whether it is friends or family or doing something which is out of the ordinary. I like doing that. I like meeting people. I like being social. During the weekends.

Of course, the second piece is that I try to dabble with a little bit of gardening. Now that I know that I am great at growing anything other than maybe onion and garlic. I think that is where I get the calm space, when I am like trying to do a little bit of my gardening.

Surabhi Marwah: Whoever you want to beat up can also be…

Piya Haldar: Yes, I can get my frustration out on that. And last but not the least, these days, as I mentioned to you that I have a little stray… which is my daughter's stray, I am bringing her up. She is called Santru. So, I am known as Santru's mother these days. I am taking care of her these days as a full time activity. Other than my job.

Surabhi Marwah: I do a lot for strays as well. People who are kind to animals, especially strays, I think it is a lovely feeling and it is just your way of giving back to in whatever way one can.

It was excellent speaking with you, Piya. Some of the things you have said have been very informative, but also very emotionally understandable. And I think a lot of people will understand where you are coming from. I completely also love and agree with your point on senior male members being mentors and being very much part of the journey, not only from a DE&I perspective. If they are part of the journey, the reskilling, the promotion, the fact that more women will come up, will just become a very automatic thing.

And it will becomes easier for the next generation to take on challenging roles if you were able to take up some. We will probably one day break the glass to the level that we want. It is been absolutely inspiring. It is a great topic that was chosen. ‘Inspiring Voices’.

You are an inspiring, great leader. Lovely to have you, Piya. And thank you very much.

Piya Haldar: Thank you so much, Surabhi and thank you so much EY team for having me here.

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Season 03, Episode 02

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The evolving role of compliance: Insights on growth and innovation

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