Consultancy of the year – Ernst & Young LLP

A solid operational risk management (ORM) system is crucial to optimising business performance and resilience, especially during unprecedented times. 

Over the past 18 months the Covid-19 pandemic has compelled financial services organisations to respond to a variety of disruptions and adapt to a changing landscape – making clear that effective ORM and resilience measures continue to be a big need for organisations around the world.

Ernst & Young LLP, a long-standing market leader in ORM, has taken a forward-thinking approach by constantly innovating and blending practical services with deep supervisory knowledge to meet client needs in this area. 

The firm’s unique ORM solutions bring together skill sets across data and analytics and technology to support financial organisations in making mission-critical business decisions. Following the onset of the global pandemic, the organisation rapidly mobilised its thought leadership and developed services for clients to respond and adapt to their business and risk challenges. This included implementing effective end-to-end processes and operating models for return-to-office programmes. 

The firm’s proprietary ORM diagnostic tool, EYsight, is a powerful data and analytical engine at its core that rapidly analyses transaction data to help assess, define and implement additional analytics to provide a client with location readiness analysis and support for making time-critical business decisions. 

EYsight’s return-to-office data-driven solution has enabled clients to proactively make informed decisions and respond to changes in health, economic and political policies, while effectively and safely enabling their workforces to return to their physical office locations. The integrated data platform leverages a combination of factors, such as external data (eg, public health data, test results) and internal data (eg, business functions and employee headcount) to provide objective analyses for financial services organisations while permitting minimal business disruption.

More notably, EYsight has the potential to support multiple scenarios, beyond the pandemic, as an effective risk management and business performance enhancement tool. The platform has the power to deliver custom next-generation business insights by gathering and analysing macro data from around the globe and combining it with cross-functional data from within the organisation. 

The firm has continued to differentiate itself through embedding technology and data into market offerings with platform-based solutions and insights to help clients manage risk. Three such platform solutions include EY Operational Resilience, EY Regulatory and Compliance Manager (EY RCM) and EY Virtual Internal Auditor (EY VIA). EY Operational Resilience, a robust enterprise resilience management solution, enables business service and operational resilience by providing the integration and levers to prevent, detect and remediate disruptions to critical business services.

The platform operationalises and delivers preconfigured decision support functionality that includes asset and process-mapping, risk horizon-scanning to map interdependencies across critical business services, scenario and testing response strategies, incident monitoring, and response and recovery decision support.

EY RCM is an AI-driven solution that enables several key areas for automation, including deconstructing regulatory text and creating an inventory of mapping elements, summarising complex obligations within the regulations into clearly understandable requirements. 

On the internal audit front, EY VIA allows continuous risk monitoring based on transactional and predictive analytics with dashboards, benchmarking and interpretation of results while identifying issues in real time.  Beyond internal audit functions, EY VIA also provides clients with immediate enterprise-wide value across lines of business and risk functions through predictive and periodic risk analytics that focus on existing red flags that pose a significant future risk. 

Together, the firm’s suite of ORM solutions provides organisations the tools to demonstrate availability, reliability, scalability and security on an ongoing basis, but especially during extraordinary times.

The judges said:

• “[Ernst & Young LLP] has the deepest subject-matter expertise of the Big Four vendors and has successfully embedded data, technology and managed services into its solutions.” 
• “[Ernst & Young LLP] is a solid consultancy with market-leading experts and good knowledge of their clients.”

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