Skilled Person Reasonable Assurance review of regulatory returns for an investment bank

After significant and ongoing delays in submitting its final accounts and concerns about the reliability of the firm’s regulatory returns, the UK regulators sought the appointment of a Skilled Person to assess and provide a view on the regulatory reporting processes. The review scope included the governance, systems and controls for specific regulatory returns and required the Skilled Person to provide a reasonable assurance opinion on the accuracy of the firm’s regulatory reporting.

Our experienced team of assurance and audit specialists on this project worked closely with our senior operations, risk and governance team members.

The firm used complex manual processes in both its financial and regulatory reporting procedures. Our team spent a significant amount of time in the firm’s office to observe live walkthrough of key process steps carried out by the finance, regulatory and reporting teams.

We conducted interviews with key executives including the Heads of Finance, Operations, Risk and Internal Audit as well as with the Regulatory Reporting team.

We gathered evidence to support our assurance opinion including working in collaboration with the external auditors of the firm to obtain and reconcile third party confirmations of balances and open positions, and reperforming selected calculations such as IFRS 9 impairment.

In addition to providing Reasonable Assurance opinions to the firm and regulator, our work helped to identify inefficiencies in the regulatory reporting process.