Newly appointed CEO of ACL Services, Laurie Schultz recently received The Minerva Foundation for BC Women “Excellence in Leadership” award, which is bestowed upon women working in non-traditional fields.
The ACL Insider sat down with Laurie to discuss this achievement. In a two part series, Laurie shares her thoughts on effective leadership and the future of ACL. Part One focused on Laurie’s Leadership. Today, she discusses the future of ACL technology.
ACL is now transforming Audit and Risk – from a technology standpoint, what trends do you see happening in Audit and Risk?
From a technology perspective, the surge of mobile devices, social commerce and Cloud has exponentially increased the amount of data that is available and the number of people that have access to it.
- approximately 30% of the world’s population is using the internet
- by the end of 2012, over 90% of the Fortune 500 will be testing or deploying on iPads
- with over 500 million users, Facebook has a customer base that if equated to a country would make it the third largest country in the world
- within North America, over one third of corporate applications will be delivered in the Cloud by the end of 2013
The proliferation of technology makes it almost impossible for a Risk Management professional to identify and police all the risks that exist in a business manually—this challenge is only going to grow. The way to resolve this is to fight fire with fire or more specifically technology with technology. ACL’s solutions have the ability to interrogate massive volumes of data to discover anomalies that could be indicators of fraud, lost revenues and/or operational inefficiencies.
How is ACL responding to this trend?
We know that only ~25% of auditors and risk professionals have adopted purpose-built technology because the solutions they have to choose from are over-built, over-complicated, and overpriced. This means that despite 25 years of leadership in the global market, there still is tremendous outstanding market potential.
Over the past year, ACL has made a significant reinvestment in our portfolio growing our R&D investment by over 50%, acquiring a Cloud-based Workpapers solution, introducing mobile applications for field-based audit professionals and evolving our solutions into risk. Our goal is to transform Audit and Risk by reinventing the customer experience with an integrated, low cost, cloud based solution that pulls together many of the disparate processes and tools that our customers deal with today. In doing so, we anticipate redefining the Audit and Risk profession as well, giving them a more active seat at the “C” table.
