Currency volatility has major implications for companies in how they manage risks and report profits and losses. 2015 has seen increasing volatility in currency markets due to quantitative easing (QE) programmes across the US, Japan and Europe, and falling commodity prices sparking interest rate cuts in some countries. In January 2015 the Swiss national bank announced it would no longer peg the Swiss franc (CHF) to the euro, causing a 30 percent jump in the CHF in less than 10 minutes and a long-term impact for exporters and the tourism industry.

To ensure we continued to deliver high-quality audits during this period of volatility, we had to make sure we identified and understood all the implications for our audit clients who held CHF-denominated assets or transacted in CHF. In addition to following our standard procedures, such as issuing a risk bulletin to our entire audit group, we also used the power of Spotlight, our audit analytics platform.

Spotlight now hosts the data of over 900 external audit clients, identifying unusual trends, transactional anomalies, and high-risk balances. Within one hour of the risk alert being issued, Spotlight was able to identify every audit client that had a material level of CHF-denominated transactions, then provided each auditor a customised message, drawing their attention to the risk bulletin and quantifying the scale of the issue for that particular client. This was crucial in increasing confidence that each audit had identified and considered the CHF issue.