Introducing ALICE – The Digital Auditor
We’re a team of auditors and risk assurance specialists. We’ve spent several decades in designing, building, and implementing world-class processes for IT and financial audits, Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance, AML Compliance, risk management, with a data-centric approach to improving internal controls and business processes for growth. We’ve also built expertise in compliance and regulations, policies and procedures, and reporting – We are Team ALICE!
Over the years, we’ve realized the importance of intelligent automation, especially with the advent of data science and AI technologies. If senior auditors and risk assurance leaders could be freed up to focus on higher-level tasks by embracing intelligent automation for routine processes, it would really make life easier.
We created ALICE with the vision of bringing to the market a world-class intelligent automation platform for audit and assurance leaders. In line with this vision, we teamed up with Janus Advisory and Consulting Services as our strategic partners, to offer the ALICE Platform to companies in the U.S. and across the world.
Read on to learn more about ALICE. Based on how ALICE has delivered intelligent automation solutions for several of our clients, we almost refer to the product as a person! So, please pardon us when we use ‘she’ and ‘the platform’ interchangeably in our posts.
The Value Proposition of ALICE
The ALICE Platform helps audit and risk assurance leaders create an ecosystem of digital services that automates the process of governing, managing, and monitoring businesses. ALICE also serves as a ‘support’ internal auditor, deftly playing an enabling role in SOX, IT, compliance, financial and operational audits.
Designed by data scientists and AI experts - in partnership with domain experts in audit and risk management - ALICE brings to fore excellent cognitive skills and data transformation capabilities.
By applying these capabilities, it frees up the time of leaders to focus on higher-level tasks that need human intelligence, while ALICE can Govern, Manage, and Monitor routine processes and data-driven reviews, tests, and audits.
Intelligent automation is critical to ensure both Continuous Monitoring (CM) and Continuous Audits (CA), instead of cyclical or episodic reviews. Near Real-Time data capture and analysis holds the key to CM and CA, and an automated platform like ALICE can do this efficiently.
Past Use Cases
Over the last three years, ALICE has been deployed at a range of enterprises. They include:
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- A leading banking and financial services group
- A large food services conglomerate
- A cloud-based robotics company
- A leading trading and distribution group
- A digital transformation and technology company
As a Digital Auditor, ALICE has played the following roles:
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- Financial Auditor: Performed financial control procedures over the liquidity model for funding 87 payrolls during the COVID-19 lockdown
- Operational Auditor: Performed operational control procedures to assist management in analyzing the profit margin movement over inventory and discounting behaviors of their sales force.
- Compliance Auditor: Performed compliance control procedures to assess the proper reporting of transactions against anti-money laundering regulation
- SOX Auditor: Automated control procedures for quarterly control tests over journals
As an AI-based Digital Services provider, ALICE has played the following roles:
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- Business Management: Performed data modeling procedures over customer spend, rebates and discounts to gain real-time business insights into customer behaviors
- Data Science: Performed data wrangling and predictive modeling to large data assets on fully managed infrastructure
ALICE, the enabler
One question we are often confronted with during the demo phase is - this too good to be true? Can ALICE really do all of this?
Our usual answer is: Think of ALICE as an enabler. She’s a trusted advisor. An AI engine that can make your life easier. The simple answer is YES!
ALICE augments and optimizes human effort with digital effort. Through her digital services, assurance functions can achieve more coverage, more scale, more automation, more real-time and continuous monitoring, more intelligence, and more value-add in a global and remote manner affording the human effort to be applied to judgmental and higher-risk areas of the business.
In our upcoming blogs, we will dig deeper into ALICE’s technology platform, her data pipeline features, and The ALICE Lab, a powerful feature that allows the user to create and design control procedures.
We will also be publishing a series of posts that’ll offer a deep dive into our approach of delivering near real-time continuous monitoring (CM) and continuous audits (CA), powered by automation.
CM and CA hold the key to building an enterprise that adopts a proactive approach to risk management and mitigation. Automation enabled by AI and data transformation capabilities holds the key to lifting any barriers to driving CM and CA efforts.
We believe The ALICE platform is designed to help assurance leaders drive the next phase of digital transformation within their enterprise.
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