Welcome to our fourth annual review of the IT hot topics for IT internal audit in financial services. The survey was
conducted in August and September 2014 through discussions with Heads of IT Internal Audit of UK financial
services organisations.
This year internal audit priorities have shifted from the hot topics we identified in our 2014 results, although not as
markedly as in previous years. Internal audit departments in the financial services industry continue to operate against
a backdrop of heightened regulatory scrutiny, emerging best practices and increasing stakeholder expectations.
Not surprisingly, this has resulted in a number of fundamental control areas featuring in this year’s top-10 hot topics.
The list of high profile items is led by ‘Cyber Security’ on the back of continued government initiated cyber exercises
and board-level appreciation of the impact a breach can make. Similarly, ‘Disaster Recovery and Resilience’ has reemerged
as an important topic as organisations focus on minimising customer impacting system outages. For the first
time, we see ‘Enterprise Technology Architecture’ emerge as a hot topic, which reflects the challenge many financial
services organisations have with large legacy estates and complex architectural maintenance demands.
There was again a consistent theme of audit attention focused on ‘Large Scale Change’ which reflects the growing
expectation for and recognition of the advantages from, proactive pre-implementation involvement of internal audit
across the large change programmes. ‘Information Security’ remains in the top 5, underlining it as complex area
which management find hard to address successfully and where internal audit often identify high-impact control
weaknesses.
More broadly, we continue to see greater reliance on IT internal audit functions to support ever increasing analytics
activity and to help assess data governance and data quality in support of broader business audit review.
We hope you find the top 10 topics, presented in priority order, a useful resource to help benchmark your
own IT audit plans for 2015 against.