How Figure Centralized Audit, Risk, and Compliance in a Single Source of Truth

In our Spotlight on Success series, Chris Patrick, Head of Internal Audit at Figure Technologies, shares how his team saved time and streamlined communication touchpoints with business stakeholders by implementing AuditBoard as a single source of truth. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Figure is transforming the trillion–dollar financial services industry using blockchain technology for loan origination, equity management, private fund services, banking, and payments. Hear how this fintech audit team reduced administrative tasks, version control issues, and communication challenges by switching from a manual environment to AuditBoard, including:

• Leveraging AuditBoard’s connected risk platform to centralize all documentation in a single source of truth.
• Completing three additional audits last year due to time savings including streamlining communication with control owners.
• Redeploying time saved on manual and administrative tasks to focus on conducting audits, improving processes, and opportunities to add value.

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

“My name is Chris Patrick. I’m the Head of Internal Audit at Figure Technologies. Figure is an interesting company — it’s a financial technology solution, and the company is predicated upon blockchain to facilitate financial services transactions.” 

“Prior to implementing AuditBoard, interacting with process owners or stakeholders was a very monotonous, arduous, and administratively intensive task. If I wanted to confirm internal controls were the same period over period, I would have to get out my register of control owners and email each control owner about their specific controls to ask them for feedback about whether the process has changed or the control language has changed. They would respond to me, and I would have to ingest their responses to evaluate the changes they made — and most of the time, they didn’t necessarily call those changes out! They would just say, ‘these are all updated,’ and it would be up to me to see whether they changed anything.

As you can imagine, that’s an administrative nightmare. It would take me several weeks to get through everybody. Then, of course, there are process owners who are busy with other tasks. My email would fall to the bottom of the list, and I didn’t have good visibility into the response rate or who hadn’t responded.”

How has implementing AuditBoard’s connected platform helped you streamline how you communicate with business stakeholders? 

“One of the things that I love about the AuditBoard solution is it has completely streamlined and made our process more efficient. Now I assign owners to controls within the system and then on a monthly or quarterly cadence I can just run a task that sends those controls out to the process owners. They then get an alert in their inbox to go into AuditBoard and make those changes. If they make a change, it appears redlined and it shows what was really retracted or added or just edited. Then when they hit the button to respond it prompts email back to me to let me know that they’ve responded.” 

How has centralizing documentation in a single source of truth empowered your team?

“It’s not only a centralized repository, it’s a centralized solution that allows you to conduct an audit from step one all the way to the execution and final audit report.” 

“What I love about AuditBoard is that if I make sure I make a change in my control language in my risk and control matrix within the system, that change automatically flows through to my narratives, as well as to my audit report in some cases. I don’t have to back out, go into another folder, go into another workpaper — it just automatically all syncs and is tied together.” 

How has your team been able to redeploy time savings to value-add work? 

“We were actually able to complete an additional three audits in the last year because of the time savings in conjunction with streamlining the communication with process owners.” 

“I’m really glad I implemented AuditBoard because it does streamline my entire process. It makes my job easier. AuditBoard removes a lot of the administrative, manual aspects and project management aspects of conducting an audit, which allows me to focus on conducting audits, finding issues, enhancing processes, and making the company more compliant — and frankly overall, gives me more time to add value to my organization.”