Reviews of the Operating Environment and Control Framework
The FS-Assur team apply technology- and data-literacy, along with functional and product expertise to the understanding of inherent risks, and process and data challenges. This cumulative experience ensures an efficient data collection stage: we know what we need and can ask the right questions, so the cycle of data/process mapping and validation has minimum redundancy and duplication.
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But unlike the majority of Financial Services Consultancies we also derive uniquely substantiated conclusions on whether a control environment is operating as it should be by applying our proprietary diagnostic and modelling tool to whole populations of data. This combines a visual approach to the discovery of data and logic problems with the ability to capture and test every business scenario. We quickly build a knowledge model of the environment which both shows client managers where and how its actual operation falls short of what is expected to mitigate risk and provides predictive data on potential exposures.
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The tool can be used to review internal reporting for Senior Management or for First and Second Line of Defence, it can also be applied surgically to help review process behaviours.
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The sort of questions we can help management answer
1. How effective are my controls over payments fraud?
We can help bring confidence to management that risk classification rules are being applied as expected to payments and that alerts and actions are working as they should be.
Using our software we can mimic and validate the cumulative build of customer payment behaviour profiles and check how the clients' live payments are being aligned to these, KYC status or changes in customer information. At the same time we use the payments data to help ensure all scenarios have been calibrated for risk and initiate appropriate action.
2. I know the reporting rules, but how can I get the end-to-end transparency to know that every event is being captured and the rules applied correctly?
FS-Assur’s software brings and transparency and quality control to the sources of transactions, enabling normalisation of data and translation of booking conventions from disparate systems. It then uses specific data elements to build scalable, consistent reporting rules, with full audit trail and traceability to validate outputs.
3. How can show the regulator that I am applying my product suitability rules and tests properly and that these link to my sales process?
We can provide traceable data-driven models to reflect the rules for product/market compatibility and risk analysis and for product/client suitability decisions to bring greater visibility and clearer justification for both regulators and management, and enable further integration of Product Design with the Product Execution Framework.
