Problem:
The end of Financial Services as we are currently used to is only a few blinks away. We are witnessing the technological destruction of the traditional auditing services; it is rearranging itself around the client.
If you compare Financial Service companies to tech giants like the Amazon’s and Google’s of this earth, it`s evident that Auditing Companies are still in the infant stage of the digital and data revolution.
The Company who solves this dilemma most relevantly and creatively through creating a combined and integrated solution for data and digital will shape the future of Audit.
The best advice and the best service in auditing services need to happen in real time and should be based on the client’s behavior, not vice versa.
Solution:
By partnering up with uprising fintech startups, Financial Service Companies will be able to give their clients a high measure of security and speed while making them future proof.
The auditing services need to become an accelerator to help banks become more Digital and therefore more profitable and secure. A win-win situation for everyone involved.
Technological Innovation will undoubtedly become the heart and blood of the banking industry, and we just made the very first step in many years to come journey. If current large banks do not adapt and leverage the most of these changes, they will be caught off guard very soon by the many uprising agile fin-tech startups who are just waiting for these mistakes to be made.
Future Audit must be able to deliver an easy to manage and navigate digital platform solution that should go far beyond simple automation, it should empower Clients and Auditors alike.
Benchmarking the companies that are audited against a broad set of data from across an industry or geography, will give much more accurate insights about potential risks and providing leaders of large organizations with valuable perspectives and insights that can be used to elevate the business.
Conclusion:
If the new breed of auditors can’t truly connect with their clients, they will be doomed to become dumb commodities, acting behind the scenes, like unwanted utilities.
Auditors won`t become redundant any time soon – but the profession itself will change more revolutionary than evolutionary. With the impact of data-driven audits, auditors will need to develop a more robust understanding of any relevant entity within the ecosystem.
Therefore the challenge for Audit isn’t becoming plainly “digital”; it will be more about providing value that will be perceived by clients to be in line with the accumulated cost, or even better, providing added value that clients are comfortable paying for.
The upcoming future change won’t come without aches and pain. Addressing concerns over auditor’s independence, data security, transparency and more will require an intense dialogue between companies and their auditors about how much insight to share, and which information should be secured and protected.
It will also require extensive engagement with regulators, to demonstrate how this data analytics revolution will first and foremost strengthen audit quality and raise current auditing standards.
Either way, traditional Audit will die a slow death soon, but Audit 3.0 will finally put back the “Human“ front and center, making future decisions not just more highly accurate and secure but more importantly, humanly relevant.
