Attestations: Demonstrable Oversight and Evidence

Attestations provide a secure and demonstrable record of critical tasks, controls and activities completed – with a formalised commitment from a responsible individual giving assurance to underpin regulatory compliance. The FCA actively uses attestations across all sectors of the financial services industry to ensure that regulated firms and senior managers are clearly accountable for taking certain disclosures across a number of situations.

A robust and effective control framework is only as strong as its weakest component. Using attestations to focus on marshalling all aspects of risk assessment and control design supports good customer outcomes, ensuring your controls environment and evidence of the operation of the controls is cutting-edge, demonstrable and resilient at all times.

Accountability

Attestations prompt and compel proactive ownership of responsibilities. This is a central tenet of the Senior Management & Certification Regime (SM&CR), designed to make individuals more accountable for their conduct and competence. Clear levels of responsibility, particularly at a senior manager level is a force for good in the industry, presenting an opportunity for stronger culture and encouraging individual ownership and responsibility.

Attestations are formalised by the FCA at industry and sector level – read more about it here.

Digitising attestations underpins and enhances firms’ control framework and process, and through increased maturity, ensures governance and ownership across the organisation. This legitimacy establishes transparency, reporting and that owners take their responsibilities seriously.

Legitimising control, underpinned with evidence and reinforced with audit trails and signed off statements, enable controls to be evidenced, demonstrable, assessed and managed throughout their operation, further ensuring accuracy, independent assessment, relevance, and resilience.

Stay in control

The FCA have announced recently that they have widely incorporated attestations into their own approach and are actively using formal assessments as a supervisory tool, and specifically reiterated how SM&CR requires individuals at all levels of a firm to become more accountable through the Senior Managers’ Regime, the Certification Regime and the Conduct Rules.

Grath can provide you with purpose-built technology and innovative, intuitive and rapid deployment of solutions which give you an immediate automated framework and attestation capability across your business. All of the Grath software is underpinned with attestation functionality as standard which compels ownership and accountability throughout your organisation.

Say goodbye to manual solutions, Excel based monitoring, disparate and fragmented evidence and say hello to a stronger tomorrow with Grath.

Grath’s technology can reduce your risk

Our platform works seamlessly with your existing technology and solutions to enhance automation and reduce risk. This includes:

Total capture of your data
Strong controls governance
Assessment of control strength and performance
Compliance monitoring
Audit assurance support and reporting
Identification and management of incidents and breaches
Resilient reconciliation processing and oversight

Grath enables governance through real-time management information and dashboard solutions, which can be used standalone, integrated, or extracted. All of our solutions are intuitive, user friendly and value adding with; robust support for proactive policy, procedural and operational model assessment, controls testing, thematic review and gap analysis assessment with remedial actions and model strengthening inbuilt as standard.

We pride ourselves on market-leading and laser-focused delivery, with rapid deployment, all managed by a team of industry-leading experts with our expertise becoming a seamless extension of your own. Grath are industry practitioners by trade and our extensive expertise enables us to partner with you to deliver solutions that enhance your business and regulatory control.

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to know how Grath’s technology can help take your regulatory compliance and risk management to the next level, then we’d love to talk.

Get in touch with us Grath | Reinventing Regulatory Compliance