Assurance
Our Assurance practice was very successful in the past year and delivered overall an impressive growth of 7.3%, fuelled especially by the Alternatives industry (Private Equity, Real Estate, Infrastructure and Hedge funds), in which our firm has - locally and globally - a leading position as auditor.
This year, the global COVID-19 pandemic has had an unprecedented impact on our clients and our People, as well as global and local economies and broader society.
At PwC, in addition to safeguarding the health, safety and well-being of our people, we have remained focused on working with our clients and other stakeholders to continue to deliver audit quality.
From the early stages of the pandemic, the PwC network put a team in place to monitor developments globally and highlight areas of critical importance to ensure we did not compromise on audit quality. We have leveraged the guidance developed by our network, but also our regulator and professional body, to provide consistent leadership and guidance on audit quality and equip our teams to consider their clients’ unique circumstances and respond accordingly.
Our response was comprehensive. It covered all aspects of audit quality, including regulatory and standard setting updates, auditor reporting, methodology, accounting and learning and education.
Our teams transitioned quickly and seamlessly to working remotely. Our audit technology infrastructure and tools enabled our People to continue to carry out their work despite the significant change in our physical work environment. The impact of COVID-19 continues to evolve. We are continuing to monitor, assess and respond to the resulting risks in our audits.
These are challenging times and, as a profession, we are under increasing scrutiny. However, the pandemic has also opened new opportunities to deliver on our purpose and demonstrate our relevance in helping build trust in capital markets and wider society. Our two absolute priorities remain the quality of each and every assurance engagement and the digitisation of the audit in all aspects, including the digital signature of the audit reports.
Our Digitisation Journey
Tools, technology and digital upskilling are at the heart of our transformation strategy and have been the cornerstone of our ability to deliver during the COVID-19 crisis and have given us confidence on our digitisation journey.
- Digital Upskilling
- Aura Platinum
- The Connect Suite
- AwM Digital Solutions: Audit Platform
- E-signature
- AI document management solutions
- Data Snipper
Digital Upskilling
Digitising the Network is a global initiative about investing in our people and equipping them with the new skills, knowledge and resources so that they can remain relevant in the face of technology change.
PwC Luxembourg is deeply committed to digitally transforming the way we work, and, to ensure a successful digital transition, we have invested in programmes and technology to help upskill all of our teams’ digital capabilities. Regardless of their job or grade, all of our professionals need to have a digital mindset, and live it in everything they do in our business, with our clients and in every aspect of how they work. To that end, we have launched Upskilling@PwC, which includes different programmes and tools to unlock the creativity and innovative power of our People to provide new solutions and improve the efficiency and impact of our services.To date, 439 of our assurance professionals have enrolled in one or more of these programmes. Our objective is to reach 100% of our professionals by the end of next year.
Aura Platinum
Aura Platinum is our global audit documentation system which is used across the entire PwC network.
The Connect Suite
The Connect Suite is our collaborative platform where we share data, document requests and audit status. It provides fast, efficient and secure information sharing with our clients and multi-location Audit teams at every stage of the audit:
- Connect monitors the status of requests and information between our clients and the engagement team in real time;
- Connect Audit Manager streamlines, standardises and automates group and component teams coordination for multi-location and statutory/regulatory audits.
AwM Digital Solutions: Audit Platform
AwM Digital Solutions: Audit Platform is our globally integrated technology, developed jointly by PwC Luxembourg and our firm in the US. An auditing platform for investment funds used to standardise and enhance the audit by applying a variety of applications to define the testing plan, import and transform data, execute risk assessment and substantive test of details procedures. Applications on this platform allow us to analyse large volumes of data for a more effective and efficient audit. We then bring them to life through data visualisation tools to see beyond numbers on a page. Together, these applications and tools enable us to automate our audit testing and unlock new value and analysis related to critical audit areas.
E-signature
E-signature: By integrating the signature platform developed by LuxTrust, PwC Luxembourg becomes a pioneer audit firm on the Luxembourgish market to use the electronic signature for audit opinions with a legal value equivalent to the handwritten signature.. The solution is mainly used by Assurance Partners for Audit deliverables at the moment but the scope of users will be progressively extended this year. For the period from December 2019 and August 25 2020, 9871 were signed using this platform.
AI document management solutions
AI document management solutions that automatically read, extract and interpret critical information from large volumes of documents and unstructured data.
Data Snipper
Data Snipper: DataSnipper is an intelligent audit tool that searches, documents, automatically matches and reviews documents (PDF, XLSX, DOCX, PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP) within Excel.
Quality remains top of our agenda
Our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems through our delivery of high-quality audits. Additionally, due to recent corporate failures and a shift in expectations of an increasingly engaged and widening set of stakeholders, there is significant and increased scrutiny on the role and quality of the audit profession. At PwC Luxembourg, we are proud of our reputation for quality and we know that maintaining the highest level of quality requires continued vigilance and constant focus.
We therefore have continued to invest heavily in the effectiveness of our audits, in the skills of our people, in our underlying audit methodology, the technology we use, and in making the right amount of time and resources available. We pay close attention to what our various stakeholders require from us, what they tell us we need to improve and to the findings of regulatory inspections on the quality of our work. Just as important are the internal indicators and processes that routinely monitor the effectiveness of our risk and quality processes, and provide timely information about the quality of our audit work and any areas for improvement.
2020 and beyond
Looking at the years ahead, quality will remain at the top of our agenda. We will further invest in continuous improvement in audit quality through new systems and technology, risk processes and learning and development for our people.
We will continue on our digital journey to not only enhance the quality and efficiency of our audits but also to bring more value and insights. ESG will increasingly become an area of focus where we believe our broader Assurance services can bring the trust investors and other stakeholders are looking for. Finally, our ambition is to continue to win new audits and assurance assignments by differentiating ourselves and embracing the market changes.
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