Client Profile:

A global provider of auto finance solutions, with operations in the U.S., Canada, China, Europe and Latin America, $40+ billion in assets, and 6,000+ employees.

 

Client Challenge:

The General Auditor was planning their annual risk assessment. Leadership desired to take a data driven approach, to maximize the effectiveness of their resources. Stakeholders envisioned a tool to collect data from their global locations in order to analyze regulatory, inherent, and residual risk. The tool would then provide reports ranking risks by APQC processes, countries, and corporate functions. Audit would leverage the data to identify emerging risks, forecast resource needs and demonstrate adequate coverage.

Management brought in Herndonwood to manage the resolution of the gaps because they understood the need to supplement existing staff, obtain missing skills, act quickly, and create structure around the process.

 
Approach & Solution:
 

Herndonwood consultants were deployed with a tight deadline and were able to rapidly build the risk assessment planning tool.

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Herndonwood services:

• Gathered requirements for the tool from stakeholders

• Collected and cleansed data including: regulatory requirements, country corruption index, KPIs, risk narratives, audit findings, audit results, fraud findings, regulatory findings, self-identified issues and SOX Findings

• Developed and deployed the tool in the client’s environment

• Generated reports based on data from the various risk factors

• Enabled the risk factor reporting weights to be easily configured to allow modeling

• Provided documentation and user training

 

Business Impact:

The General Auditor was able to identify which countries, corporate functions, and APQC processes posed the most risk.  The tools reporting on the data greatly reduced the time required to develop the audit plan, provided a single source for Internal Audit’s risk assessments and created a benchmark to measure global risk exposure going forward.