Pranav Kapoor: Adapting Audit Departments to Provide Continuous Assurance

Pranav Kapoor, Global Head of Decision Analytics Audit Innovation
at Manulife, discusses how he’s evolving the insurance firm’s audit
function to support continuous auditing and advanced analytics

Automation promises to revolutionize the internal auditing
process by enabling teams to continually gather from process data
that supports auditing activities.


As Manulife Global Head of Decision Analytics Audit Innovation
Pranav Kapoor notes, this will enable auditors to provide their
businesses with more regular assurance about risk management,
governance and their internal control processes.


In this week’s episode of the Business of Data podcast, he talks
about the work his team is doing to make this vision of the
future a reality.


“The biggest opportunity we believe is to provide continuous
assurance to the business,” he says. “If you can use automation
to run these audits pretty much when you desire, or even in
real-time, I think that’s the piece where continuous auditing
processes become very interesting.”


“You can really see a high demand in internal audit teams to push
in that direction,” he adds. “Everyone in the business sees the
value around it.”
Pranav Kapoor, Global Head of Decision Analytics Audit
Innovation, Manulife“We need to drive the innovation culture and
embed digital skills and knowledge into all our auditors, and not
just a small team that will be aware of these skills”

As a business function, internal audit (IA) is evolving rapidly.
Companies including Manulife are looking at how IA can stop
focusing purely on risk discovery and start using automation and
analytics to drive innovation.


“We want to the be the innovative function in the audit group,”
says Kapoor. “In my utopia, the auditors will have analytics
skills and the data analytics group, which is my group, will
become the innovation function.”


To achieve this, Kapoor has been working to ensure Manulife’s
auditors have a common definition of what analytics is and
educate them about the power of analytics to improve their
productivity.


Of course, educating staff about the benefits of automation and
securing buy-in for analytics projects is the first step in a
much larger journey. Kapoor sees these efforts as a starting
point for the more ambitious goal of enabling continuous auditing
and assurance in the long-term.
Key Takeaways


Automation is the future of IA. Continuous
auditing will allow IA teams to provide the business with audit
assurance more regularly


Data literacy is key. Data-focused leaders
must equip non-data staff with the right skills to drive
business transformation


Quick wins come first. Delivering smaller
projects that make auditors’ lives easier is helping Kapoor
secure buy-in for larger initiatives