The Future of Audit

Fostering confidence in capital markets is key to ensuring economies can function properly. KPMG’s purpose is to inspire confidence and empower change, to create value for our clients, our people, and society. The value of an audit is not only in regulatory compliance but in the assurance it brings to a company and its stakeholders – from its shareholders, employees and suppliers, to its lenders, regulators and the communities it serves and operates in. It’s a responsibility that our People take very seriously and are passionate about. That’s also why we’re constantly innovating to better serve the capital markets and society as a whole.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition to a more digital world, forcing businesses and people to operate remotely and embrace digital transformation — whether they were ready for it or not. While the audit process was already evolving with the emergence of new technology and growing investor expectations, COVID-19 has also significantly accelerated the evolution toward a digital audit.

This isn’t simply a matter of moving the traditional audit process online or conducting an audit over video chats. Rather, the future of audit is about digital transformation and revamping the audit process into something entirely new, to reimagine the audit experience. It’s about embedding digital innovation into the audit process through data and analytics (D&A), technology-enabled risk assessment, artificial intelligence (AI) and other new technologies in order to achieve three objectives:

• a higher quality audit,
• a more efficient audit, and
• cutting-edge business insights for clients.

Our next-generation audit platform – KPMG Clara – houses advanced, predictive analytics within a single, cloud-based source and seamlessly adopts the latest cognitive and Artificial Intelligence solutions. This allows KPMG professionals to tap into advanced technologies that bring clients a greater range and depth of insights into risks and anomalies. It can also unleash the potential of their data by helping them see meaningful patterns across their business at a deeper level than before.

Our clients have access to KPMG Clara throughout the audit process, providing a centralized, 24/7 window into the status of their audit. The net result is greater interaction with their engagement team, which consists of more targeted and meaningful conversations about specific findings, risks and insights. Their audits also benefit from our alliances with leading technology companies — IBM Watson and Microsoft — working to ensure our technology and capabilities are second-to-none. It’s all part of the transformation of audit to harness the power of leading technology to provide higher quality results.

We can make the most amazing analyses via our new audit platform and its embedded technology, but the output of those analyses still have to be properly interpreted and explained.  And that’s what our talented professionals do on a daily basis. By bringing the right people with the knowledge, experience, and purpose-driven mindset to each engagement, we’re able to get to better insights. While investments in technology are critical, audit is ultimately a people business, and always will be.

That’s why at KPMG we’ve shaped a culture that reinforces integrity, independence, objectivity, and well-being, by investing in our people, their learning and development and their careers. This in turn enables us to build stable, passionate teams who share a common purpose and are committed to our clients for the long-term. By listening attentively, we learn the intricacies of our clients’ business environments, and act as a sparring partner and a trusted sounding board for our clients, inspiring confidence so their management teams and boards can focus on the future.