Organisations in the UK are compelled by regulatory changes to achieve resilience with robust internal controls, sound financial reporting and ample anti-fraud measures.
The introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (UK SOx) aims to rebuild trust in the financial ecosystem and funding landscape of the UK, while emphasising accountability for finance and audit leaders. Compliance with UK SOx will become a legal requirement for any Public Interest Entities (PIE’s) and any publicly listed companies (PLC’s).
Under this new approach, Finance and Audit Directors are legally required to vouch for the accuracy of financial statements and ensure thorough review of controls and processes.
This represents a significant change in auditing and financial reporting habitus, insofar as the governing body will hold company directors personally responsible for the accuracy of financial statements.
"UK SOx compliance is a monumental change in the landscape of auditing and financial reporting and I can confidently say that UK SOx is the most significant transformation I have witnessed."
Anish Kapoor
CEO
Download our guide, written by our CEO Anish Kapoor, where he discusses the origins of UK SOx, the timeline for implementation, the implications for risk and finance managers, plus a checklist to help Finance & Audit teams prepare.
Internal controls enhance risk visibility, accountability, and transparency while reducing manual tasks and strengthening the resilience of your finance and IT functions. They also guide best practice for organisational change and behaviours to adapt to a more resilient way of working.
Improve corporate transparency with accurate financial information, flagging any risks or errors early on. Automating financial reports means data is less likely to be tampered with, as workflows remove the need for manual intervention. This results in higher quality and reliable information; boosting shareholder and investor confidence in your company’s financial reports.
Businesses typically need to defend against various forms of fraud, including theft of inventory or cash, forgery (such as invoices or cheques), expenses claim fraud, procurement fraud, payment fraud, and insurance fraud. Standardised payment controls reduce the likelihood of fraud as there is less risk that financial data may be manipulated in manual processing steps.
“We needed something that reflected our controlled environment, with an additional layer to flag that there is no risk of fraud. Previously this was a manual process and meant there was nothing stopping someone from logging in and adding miscellaneous bank account details, for example. The payment approval process controls in AccessPay helped reduce this risk.”
Head of Change and Procurement, Darlington Building Society
Read the full case studyThe AccessPay platform allows businesses to implement automated payment controls, eliminating manual touchpoints in payment processing and bank statement data. It offers standardised controls across all payments, approval workflows, clear segregation of duties, secure system access via multi-factor authentication (MFA) or single sign-on (SSO), and encrypted data.
Audit trails are also automatically recorded for every action and transaction, providing accurate data to support future and ongoing financial audits, providing a comprehensive paper trail to support internal investigations.
Automating bank statement feeds provides the ultimate source of truth for financial reporting and facilitates accurate reconciliation, reducing the risk of human error or the chance for fraudsters to manipulate financial statement data.
AccessPay’s automated file transformation capabilities eliminate manual touchpoints and ensure data enters the finance application in the correct format. It can connect to any bank, standardising processes across your organisation’s entire banking estate and removes the need for manual access to sensitive banking credentials. Daily and intra-daily MT messages ensure that bank statements automatically enter connected finance applications, guaranteeing consistency in the process.
More on automating bank statement feeds
AccessPay’s Fraud & Error Prevention Suite enables corporates to proactively detect fraud by scanning payment files for key fraud indicators such as unrecognised creditors, exceeded transaction/file value thresholds, and duplicate payments/beneficiaries.
AccessPay also performs Sanctions Screening checks and Account Name Verification checks to avoid payments to scammers. The segregation of duties within payment approval workflows and dual approval rules ensures a multi-layered approach to reviewing payment submissions.
Fraud & Error Prevention Suite
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