Risk management in the financial sector is more strongly enforced now than ever before. It’s also becoming increasingly embedded in national and international rules and regulations. Solvency II, Basel III, ORSA and SIRA are designed to provide financial enterprises with frameworks for improving their risk management practices. To safeguard an organisation’s ability to continue as a going concern, it needs to develop a continuous awareness of the risks it faces and the potential impact of trends in the market on its risk profile.

The need for executives, supervisory directors and regulators to know about the principal risks facing an organisation and the quality of its controls is rising exponentially. The belief that the quality of hard controls is the only metric worth looking at is a thing of the past.

Internal audit spans a broad spectrum and increasingly also encompasses strategic themes such as the sustainability of business models and dealing with strategic risks. Other relevant issues include IT, compliance, integrated reporting, conduct & culture and technological developments. This calls for a breadth and depth of expertise, tools and techniques that not every financial enterprise can afford to have available in-house. Our specialists from the Financial Services Sector Group would be happy to enter into a dialogue with you about co-outsourcing and outsourcing internal audit services, or to provide input on how to conduct a theme-specific audit or an audit of conduct and culture issues in your organisation.

Read more about internal audit and Risk.