How Wise’s risk and internal audit teams enhanced their value-delivering capabilities

In our Spotlight on Success series, Mohammad Khan (Product Owner, Risk Tooling & Analytics) and Michelle Cubid (Internal Audit Lead) share how Wise’s risk and internal audit teams leveraged AuditBoard to effectively identify and manage their risks – helping to ensure their company can continue growing as a scalable global business. Headquartered in London, Wise is a financial technology company focused on global money transfers, enabling people and businesses to move money quickly, conveniently, and instantly.

Hear how Wise transitioned their risk management program from underperforming GRC tools and spreadsheets into AuditBoard – improving visibility and collaboration between teams.

• Connected their risks in a single source of truth, with a library of risks and a library of controls that everyone understands.
• Improved understanding of the organization’s risk profile and improved risk management processes.
• Saw a steady increase in user adoption of AuditBoard, with about 10% of Wise now using the solution.

Tell us a little about Wise, and some of the challenges you faced in your previous manual audit environment.

Mohammad Khan (Product Owner, Risk Tooling & Analytics): "Before we got AuditBoard, we used a number of other GRC tools, but they weren’t really fleshed out or rolled out well within our organization. So we probably ended up using Excel all the time, or Google Sheets.

A common problem people face is that they log their issues, their controls, and their risks in Excel sheets, and then what happens is they have hundreds of versions of the same issue. And, come reporting season, or when there comes a time when we need to quantify our risks, the fact that nothing was in a centralized source of truth meant that we spent too much time trying to figure things out, rather than actually getting value-add out of the situation."

How has AuditBoard improved your process?

Michelle Cubid (Internal Audit Lead):AuditBoard helped us connect our risks through a single source of truth, so we now have a library of risks that everyone understands, and at the same time, a library of controls that everyone understands. It has been helpful for us in terms of understanding our risk profile and managing our risks appropriately because "AuditBoard helped us connect our risks through a single source of truth, so we now have a library of risks that everyone understands, and at the same time, a library of controls that everyone understands. It has been helpful for us in terms of understanding our risk profile and managing our risks appropriately because we now have a single point of reference for all things risk management."

Mohammad Khan (Product Owner, Risk Tooling & Analytics): "The adoption of AuditBoard within our organization has been really good in the sense that our numbers have been steadily increasing. We started off with probably 100-200 unique monthly users, and that’s slowly grown over time, and now we’re at a stage where we have more than 500 monthly users. And within our organization, which has about 5,000 to 6,000 people, that’s almost 10% of our company using the tool on a monthly basis, which has been really positive."

Michelle Cubid (Internal Audit Lead): "As we scale as an internal audit function, which is related to the growth of Wise as a whole, we will leverage AuditBoard’s capabilities and we will partner with AuditBoard to provide our feedback on how we can enhance the different functionalities that it has to offer to help us deliver internal audit’s value within Wise."