Audit: Bringing the best people together with the right technology to deliver quality audits

Transcript

Jass: When we provide our audit and assurance services to our clients, they expect those to be human-led, human-led because they value those qualities that we bring around our analytical skills, our curiosity, our approach to challenge, and the empathy that we show. They also expect them to be tech-powered. Tech-powered because those deliver the highest quality audit, they make the audits more efficient, they make our assurance services more efficient and we benefit from the huge investment we've made in technology tools that we have available to us.

Marc: My role is to develop the teams, to develop the technology and make sure that they bring all of this together to deliver the service to our clients.

Jass: The clients challenge is around high quality, but also trust. Trust in their numbers, trust in their KPIs and what we're giving audit and assurance comfort on.

Marc: Their systems are more and more complex, and so they're looking for their auditors to use technology themselves to look at their own technology, to look at the information that they provide.

Jass: And if we're providing that, it's really important that we bring the best people, but we also have the best technology to deliver that.

Marc: My audit partners want to know how they can make a decision, how they use artificial intelligence, for example, to help them make the right decision as they make judgement calls.

Jass: So in order to continue to provide the highest quality work and make sure we've got the very best people and the very best technologies, we do a couple of key things. Firstly is to make sure we get feedback from our clients, feedback on the service they receive and how we could improve and think about the future. But then secondly, we always challenge ourselves around how we can provide more training, more experience/expertise to our people. But also we continue to invest hugely in the technologies that we have available to us.

Marc: I'm really proud of what we've done in investing in all of our people and changing the mindset across the whole of audit. So we now have teams that can use the technology that is available to them today, to do data analytics and other areas of automation. From a capabilities, we are spending over $1,000,000,000 with partners to develop the next generation audit, and this will really tend to boost the way we deliver the audit of the future.