Taking control

In 2018 we published our Mission: control in Financial Services paper which explored how the industry was responding to an increased focus on management of non-financial risk. We explored the emergence of the Chief Controls Officer (CCO) role at several financial institutions and how they were creating a single leadership position that owns the control narrative across the 1^st line.

In the wake of the pandemic, we can see that further social, economic, and regulatory developments have had an unprecedented effect on business models, customer behaviour and industry ways of working. We are now in an always on, digital, right now, and often hybrid environment. This profoundly impacted the demands put on 1^st line internal control functions.

Our latest thinking delves into five key challenges facing the function today, including:

• Clarity of mandate
• Maintaining the service model’s relevance as organisational needs evolve
• Alignment of skillsets to needs
• Increasing efficiency through tooling and technology
• Optimising the structure of internal control teams

Our clients find themselves in an environment of changing business dynamics, economic & social disruptions, with constant change required to address an evolving regulatory landscape, changing customer demands and continued transformation efforts. Internal control teams play a pivotal role in unlocking business value to pioneer and facilitate this business transformation.

How we can help

We are uniquely placed to deliver multi-disciplinary expertise to help mature and transform your control capabilities. We help our clients build their internal capability, skillset and tooling for a sustainable and affordable execution of the internal control agenda.

Our approach to transforming an organisation’s internal control capability builds on our expertise and experience across multiple sectors. The key components of our services are:

• Agnostic of risk domain, our operating model approach begins with the most fundamental asset in your internal control teams: your people. We help leaders build capability from scratch, benchmark capabilities to pinpoint areas for enhancement and transform existing people, process and technology capabilities
• Our design and implementation approach helps embed a control framework that is tailored to your business and strategic goals and more importantly the risks that your organisation is exposed to
• For clients wishing to adopt an always on approach, our controls digitalisation capability helps leaders transition from a manual control environment to an automated one
• Through our controls culture approach, we can support you to build capability, confidence and understanding, to turn the concept of internal control from a blocker into an enabler of accelerated business transformation
• Our control tools, tech and solutions offering helps you leverage opportunities for technology enablement across the control management lifecycle making it easier, more effective and data-driven
• With our operate offering, we provide industry-leading expertise and delivery methodologies to run management testing programmes on your behalf.

Key contacts

If you would like to hear more about our Financial Services Controls capabilities or discuss any of the points highlighted above, please reach out to a member of the team below.