We are pleased to issue our latest viewpoint on the information technology hot topics for Internal Audit functions in financial services

Technology, digitisation, and resilience are central themes seen by the financial services sector as underpinning future business success. As with all periods of significant change, business leaders have been required to act quickly to respond, and Internal Audit were also called upon, to provide well-needed assurance over risks, as decisions were made at pace, many of them with technology at their heart. 
IT internal audit must continue to play an important role in assuring risks and advising Technology functions on how best to balance priorities around fast delivery of change and accelerated time to market, with appropriate levels of governance and control.

Cyber remains the number one ‘hot topic’, continuing the trend for the best part of a decade now we have been running this survey. Certain underlying trends we have noted this year, revolve around topics like cloud, operational resilience and data which were much more prominent in the overall mix of responses.

It is also noticeable that topics such as operational resilience and cloud, are areas where multiple IT risk disciplines such as cyber, technology resilience, and third party risk management (all of which are captured in the survey as items in their own right), coalesce, and we believe this reflects the importance of also considering such IT risk areas in aggregate. This requires IT Internal Auditors staying close to the changing regulatory environment around these areas, and Internal Audit leaders ensuring the combination of skills in the team are keeping pace with emerging risk themes.

We hope this paper offers useful insights for your ongoing conversation with technology and business leaders, and supports your risk assessment and planning process for 2022.

IT hot topics through the years: 2012-2022

Below is a comparison of the top 10 IT internal audit hot topics over the past ten years as identified through our annual survey of Heads of IT Internal Audit in the financial services sector. Topics which appear in more than two years have been colour-coded to help illustrate their movement in the top 10 over time.