Sector view

Banking and financial services

Overlapping supervisory expectations, a permanent audit cycle, and evidence gathered by hand every quarter.

The reality

A regulated financial institution in the region is rarely answering to one regime. Central bank supervision runs continuously, a national assurance standard applies in parallel, an international certification is demanded by counterparties, and a privacy law sits underneath all of it. Each of these asks similar questions in a different vocabulary, and most institutions answer them separately, which is why the audit crunch never actually ends.

How the work is organised

One control baseline, assessed once, expressed against each regime that applies. Where a mapping between two frameworks genuinely exists, evidence gathered for one supports the other, which removes the duplicated collection that consumes most of the quarter. Where a mapping does not exist, we say so rather than implying reuse.

The trap we see most often

Treating supervision as an examination to pass. A central bank is a continuing supervisor rather than a one-time examiner, so evidence that a control operated every month matters more than evidence that it exists today. Programmes built for an audit date tend to fail the second year.