Helping internal audit get to the point

Internal audit might be the last place you’d think a bank’s tone of voice would reach. But HSBC knew it had to be one of the first.​

Influencing decisions at the very highest levels of the bank, the internal audit team’s words have to be precise – and concise – to get their message across to time-strapped execs in the short space of a board agenda item. And HSBC’s team knew they could be doing better. ​

Spotting the issue​

In our interviews with the team, we heard two common themes: issue reports and their executive summaries, which everyone felt could be clearer, more concise, and more to the point. ​

Training new ways of thinking​

Based on what we heard, we rewrote the team’s issue-writing guidelines. Then we created a set of workshops off the back of that: a full-day session around the new guidance, and a half-day devoted solely to that all-important precis, the executive summary. Planning, structuring, writing and editing were all on the agenda as we set out to hone the internal audit team’s skills.​

The world tour that followed saw our trainers crossing the globe to run workshops in Canada, Mexico, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Dubai and more.

Want to know more about our work with HSBC? There's more where that came from here.