Banking - Internal Audit
In today’s dynamic regulatory and economic environment, Internal Audit (IA) can play a significant role in helping organisations respond to ever-increasing demands through a robust internal controls environment.
Whether through fully outsourced IA arrangements, or the provision of co-source assistance, we take a collaborative approach to IA, ensuring that IA does not alienate itself from the business, but is instead seen as a trusted advisor for the business and those charged with governance.
Current market Challenges
In the wake of a global pandemic and Ukraine War the UK regulators have placed significance importance on how organisations are building operational and financial resilience to protect the market and ultimately consumers. This is a common theme throughout the FCA and PRA’s 22/23 objectives and a key area of focus.
Some other key regulatory changes/areas of focus for 2023 are summarised below:
- Consumer Duty – replacing Principles 6 and 7 of the FCA handbook. The new rules will impact any organisation that distributes or manufactures products and/or services to retail customers and are required to be implemented by July 2023 or July 2024 for closed books.
- Cyber Security risk is a top priority for financial services organisations given the increased levels of targeted ransomware, supply chain attacks and the risks associated with the rise of cloud usage.
- Financial Crime continues to be a focus for the FCA and in particular how challenger banks are testing their financial crime controls when entering the UK market.
- Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) remains high on the regulatory agenda with the expectation that ESG risks are appropriately identified, assessed and addressed.
Other areas of focus include:
- Conduct & governance
- Credit risk
- IT resilience
- Prudential
- Technology and operations
- Appointed representative regime
- Market abuse
How we can help
Our team of experienced auditors and specialists provide IA services to a large number of organisations in the Banking and Capital Markets industry and are able to deliver high value insights through outsource and co-source arrangements, secondments and the provision of EQAs.
Our UK team has specialists in risk management, prudential reporting, regulatory compliance, ESG, financial crime, model risk, cyber and IT. As a result, we are able to add real value to organisations by understanding the risks they face.
Our current client base consists of:
- UK retail and corporate banks
- Challenger / start-up banks
- UK branches/subsidiaries of international banks
- Building societies
- Other credit institutions
In addition to traditional IA techniques, we can also deploy data analytics to gain an overview of a wider population and data set and as a means of continuous auditing.
Case study | ||
We have experience in applying IA guidance and best practice in a proportionate way to ensure our clients get the maximum benefit from our work. We spend time getting to know our clients in order to develop a comprehensive audit universe, risk assessment and annual audit plan that fully addresses the risks to their organisation.
For one of our banking clients, we developed a three-year plan, performing audits across all key risk areas, including:
The plan comprised of audits requiring specialist input from our regulatory and technology teams and deeper dives into specific risk areas. We were able to provide a number of value-add recommendations that ultimately improved the overall control environment, ensuring the enhancements were proportionate but also scalable where the target was growth. | ||
Get in touch
Please contact us if you require any further information on the internal audit services we provide.
Key contacts