‘Don’t Slam On the Brakes After Your CASS Audit.. 🚌’ | Regulatory Insights Series #5 🚀

‘Don’t slam on the brakes after your CASS audit 🚌’

Audits are a bit like buses… you spend months waiting for one and then two come along at once. Except these buses look very different each year and the driver is getting stricter about the fare.

As regulated firms know well, closing a CASS audit and submitting the final opinion to the FCA will be the culmination of what’s often a lengthy and costly process.

When the process is complete, firms could be forgiven for seeking a well-earned break from CASS activities. However, with planning and careful management, the audit process and outcomes requiring remediation can be used to add real value to a business, helping to reduce future audit-cycle breaches.

Let Grath lighten the load

Grath can be leveraged to simplify the entire audit process, using obligation-mapped controls to structure and guide walkthroughs, right through to demonstrably evidencing the completion of process activities directly helping the auditor perform substantive testing.

Post submission, firms will likely have a number of remediation actions to resolve which can range from small incident-led issues to wholesale regulatory change programmes. Our platform uses incident-management capabilities, task management, and assurance manager modules to simplify breach closure.

Let Grath take the wheel

Central to CASS is the need for compliant client asset reconciliations. Firms that experience thematic breaches in respect of their client money and safe custody asset reconciliations will be familiar with audit observations that range from data integrity, ingestion timings, consistent discrepancy treatment, and the perennial concerns around controlling huge data sets in Excel.

Grath’s purpose-built reconciliation utility solves these problems, built specifically to support firms with this process. Custom rule building allows consistent treatment of transactional and balance data, categorising and allocating exception items in a timely and fully auditable manner.

Your last CASS audit may have completed its journey,  but make sure you catch the next one on time.

All aboard! 🚌