ACL Success Story – Banking & Finance – T.C. Ziraat Bankasi A.S.

2011-07-01

T.C. Ziraat Bankasi A.S.

“ACL has been a crucial resource for our organization. We’ve enhanced audit efficiency and productivity, while detecting fraud and fund misappropriation with secure faster analysis.”

Ali Aras, President of Audit Department, T.C. Ziraat Bankasi A.S.

Customer Profile

Founded in 1863, T.C. Ziraat Bankasi A.S. is the largest bank in Turkey. The state-owned institution provides banking, financial, insurance and credit card services at over 1,300 branches, 50 special operations centers, and 25 bureaus in Turkey and in 17 countries around world. Ziraat Bank is headquartered in Ankara, with over 23,000 employees and annual net profits of £1.48 billion.

Objectives

In today’s business environment, effective planning requires quick access to critical enterprise data. At the same time, the role of internal auditors continues to shift and evolve. Auditors must adapt to new responsibilities and use automated techniques to provide strategic intelligence. Tailored audit analytics offer one of the most effective solutions to help these teams enhance their efficiency and productivity.

Since 2005, the Ziraat Bank Central Audit Department (CAD) has used ACL solutions to uncover internal fraud and identify potential control risks. There are four auditors and four assistants in the CAD, plus 239 auditors in the larger Bank Supervisory Commission.

Audit managers and the CAD use the ACL solution to detect fraud without costly, time-consuming site visits. It equips them to analyse bank and branch balance sheets and measure risk exposure. The analytics also test large data files to determine credit placement, follow-up account balances, structural changes to deposit accounts, and other significant customer activities. Suspicious transactions identified by ACL analytics are then transferred to bank branch managers for additional investigation.

Implementation and Planning

Ziraat Bank’s recently implemented ACL solution provides end-to-end business assurance. With over 2.5 million daily transactions flowing through corporate systems, the CAD needs powerful technology to help identify business risks and fraud. Using traditional, manual audit techniques is simply not possible with such high data volumes.

The bank’s Branch Risk Project uses sophisticated audit technology to analyse complete data files, including credits, debits, transaction totals, employee profiles, audit history, and other critical files. The CAD can easily add new analytics based on emerging risks, regulations, or areas of concern. The technology also ensures that best practices are embedded in daily audit activities. With analytics stored in a central repository, the team doesn’t have to build new projects from scratch or risk losing technical knowledge if key staff members leave the company.

Results

Ziraat Bank has applied ACL technology to:

• Identify fraud, fund misappropriation and suspicious activities
• Quickly analyse millions of daily transactions

With strategic ACL technology, the CAD is now the bank’s most important fraud detection resource. The CAD uses ACL to perform multi-dimensional tests that pinpoint exceptions across all transactions, based on user-defined timeframes. Flexible analytics enable auditors to see the big picture, and hone in on individual files for further investigation. The solution has significantly cut the operational costs associated with detecting fraud and risk through manual techniques. Analyses that would have taken several days to complete can now be run in minutes.

The solution is flexible, efficient, and has equipped the CAD and other internal auditors to provide business assurance based on broad risk analysis. Data tests, results and templates are stored in a secure repository with role-based user access. Centralised storage promotes repeatable, sustainable audit work and high-quality fraud investigations.

Next Steps

Ziraat Bank continues to expand its data analytics and move toward testing corporate transactions in near-real time. The CAD remains a vital resource for fraud and risk detection – adding value, productivity and real efficiency to the entire organisation.