Controls utopia
Today, the drive for growth alongside changing technologies, risks, regulations and ways of working has left some organizations struggling to handle their controls. What should the future state of controls look like? Organizations should be striving for a controls framework with a clear purpose that can effectively and efficiently reduce risk and enable impactful decision-making. Organizations looking to transform could benefit from:
- A simplified and sustainable risk and control environment.
- Controls that are preventative, automated and self-evidencing.
- Automation of controls, KCI monitoring and controls testing.
- Increased productivity and cost savings, freeing up capacity by reducing the effort required to maintain and manage superfluous controls.
Now is the time for businesses to optimize and automate their risk and control framework to drive efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability while aiming to reduce risk.
Controls transformation
Explore how to turn vision to reality and achieve a fully integrated and automated risk and control lifecycle.
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The risk and control lifecycle — Optimized and automated
To meet present and future challenges a risk and control lifecycle that is fully automates and integrated could be the answer.
What are the potential benefits?
The potential benefits of a fully automated and integrated risk and controls lifecycle are multi-faceted and can include the following:
- • Common methodology that can help all levels of the business see the relationship between process, risks, regulation, controls and risk appetite.
- • Controls are synchronized with business and risk objectives, helping businesses reach strategic goals.
- • Strategic control creation breaks down silos and provides a clear wide-ranging view of risks across the organization.
- • Controls are embedded in processes (not bolted on) and configured to be preventative and automated (rather than detective and manual). This embedding helps to mitigate risks more effectively, detect potential breaches earlier and enable rapid deployment of corrective measures compared to detective controls.
- • Optimization of the control framework helps remove redundant and duplicate controls, leaving fewer controls to operate, monitor and test.
- • Controls are automated, flexible and aligned to digitized and optimized processes resulting in less manual intervention, considerable cost savings and controls that can adapt to new risks and regulations.
- • Greater ownership of risks and controls by the first line and improved collaboration between the first, second and third lines provide better data quality, embedded assurance, increased clarity, and minimized overlapping review.
- • Digitized and automated monitoring capabilities allow for real-time issue identification and data analysis, enabling accurate prediction of emerging trends and associated risks impacting process and risk environments.
- • Self-evidencing and automated controls and monitoring capabilities provide complete and standardized data and better reporting to an evolved internal audit, focusing on key risks, advice, the anticipation of future risks and control transformation.
- • Increase the volume (including sample sizes), speed, quality, accuracy, timeliness and assurance gained from controls testing through automation.
- • Configured self-evidenced controls provide standardized outputs that enable more holistic (e.g. global controls), efficient and effective controls testing.
- • Automated controls typically require smaller sample sizes meaning less manual, labor-intensive control testing is required.
- • Standardized, optimized, automated controls and data are more easily maintained.
- • Controls can quickly scale and adapt to new or changing risks.
- • Controls and data can be easily re-platformed to new technology or solutions (such as an outsourced managed service).
- • Redundant controls can be quickly identified and retired.
