Imagine if you could streamline the auditing process with automation, eliminating inefficiencies and ensuring seamless data management. How to collaborate with your business, clients, or bank to tackle this data challenge and unlock the full potential of reliable financial accountability?

In this blog, you can read how audit firm 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 receives complete transactional data of their audit client, using Circit鈥檚 Verified Transactions, powered by the Business Account Insight API of ABN AMRO. 

Every business transaction, whether it's purchasing, sales or payroll, ultimately results in a corresponding bank transaction. These bank transactions serve as crucial, independent evidence that links various financial activities. Most organizations are required to provide financial accountability every year, ensuring that their financial statements are accurate and transparent. This accountability is key to maintaining trust with stakeholders, regulatory bodies and investors.

However, the management and linking of this data is not always well organized. When bank transactions are poorly handled or not properly aligned with business activities, auditors struggle to verify financial data. This creates inefficiencies in the audit process and undermines the reliability of audit evidence, jeopardizing financial accountability. The preparation and approval of the annual report is both an intensive and meticulous job, all for the purpose of producing a fair view of the company鈥檚 financial position.

The integration of Circit鈥檚 platform with ABN AMRO鈥檚 API has been highly valuable, enabling us to efficiently handle batch transactions and enhance our data-driven audit approach. This collaboration has improved our audit process, making it more efficient and reducing repetitive work relating to, for instance, manual data cleaning.

Max de Groot
Senior Consultant
乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 The Netherlands

The objective

Auditor 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 is always looking to maximize the use of data in their data-driven audit strategy to improve and innovate their processes. 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 was an early adopter in using payments through Circit, and the payment details that were collected from this were used as external audit evidence. Initially, this was through Circit鈥檚 PSD2-based API connections. However, with the extensive usage of batch payments in the Netherlands, another challenge arose, as the PSD2 transaction data payments are only shown on aggregated amounts, without the details of the individual payments. This led to manual work for the auditor and the organization being audited in order to obtain the required insight into the batch details.

The 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 Audit team wanted to automate the retrieval of bank transactions, including batch transactions, without the need for any manual data cleanup, aiming for an efficient process for the auditor and the organization being audited.

We are thrilled to be working with 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 as a customer and with ABN AMRO as an integrator. Being a former auditor, I am super excited about solving the batch details issue for audit firms and enabling the use of bank data as a critical external audit evidence data source. At Circit, we are delighted to bring the fully data-driven audit one step closer to reality.

Jaap de Waard
VP of business development for Benelux & APAC at Circit

An innovative solution to collect payment batch data

Circit, in their mission to support audit firms in being able to 鈥榯rust every transaction鈥�, was determined to solve the batch detail issue for auditors in the Netherlands and leverage their banking relationships.

乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网鈥檚 audit client, having its main bank accounts at ABN AMRO and being a leader in Data Services, directly experienced how innovative technology can save time and improve the process of the audit.

In the field of commercial APIs, ABN AMRO has a leading position in the Netherlands. One of the APIs in its portfolio, the Business Account Insight API, supports transaction data, including batch details. As this API was originally designed for business clients to connect directly, ABN AMRO aimed to innovate the API and to make the exchange of data available for more use cases. To that end, ABN AMRO recently  launched the 鈥楤ank Connectivity鈥� capability. This means that (trusted) third parties can connect with their commercial APIs. 

With the individual payment details being available, data analytics has become much more insightful and provides direction and value to the audit as a whole.

Niels Jonkers
Senior Associate
乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 The Netherlands

How it works

Circit facilitated 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 Netherlands to receive complete transactional payment data for their audit client by using ABN AMRO鈥檚 Bank Connectivity. Circit connects to the Business Account Insight API, including the Batch Transaction Details add-on, and with the explicit approval of the audit client, Circit is able to retrieve the data and make it available in real time to 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网.

Circit's 鈥榁erified Transactions鈥� was extended to allow ABN AMRO's detailed data to be included in the same standardized format as all other Circit bank connections, making it seamless for 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 to also ingest the additional batch payment details with built-in reconciliation.

We were new to Circit's use-case of ABN AMRO's data, but once we understood that our leading position in commercial API connections can lower the administrative burden for all our corporate clients that require an audit, we were supportive right away. Circit perfectly fits the profile of a Bank Connectivity user, providing our Embedded Finance services into their platform.

Lianne Oversteegen
Business Developer Commercial API Team at ABN AMRO

Key benefits of working together

This automated approach results in the following benefits for the auditor and auditee:

  • Data-driven audit strategy with full access to all payment transactions, including detailed batch payments.
  • The standardized data format eliminates the need for manual cleanup, ensuring immediate high-quality datasets.
  • Comprehensive availability of relevant payment details for auditing purposes.
  • Time savings throughout the entire financial audit process.

In addition to data analytics, 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网 was able to innovate the audit strategy from a sample-based approach to procedures that test all payment transactions, reducing the time required and increasing the audit coverage by enabling full population testing.

This collaborative initiative by 乐鱼(Leyu)体育官网, ABN AMRO, and Circit has successfully streamlined the process, which resulted in a true win-win-win project to successfully streamline the process of providing comprehensive bank data, benefiting all parties involved.

Contact us

We will keep you informed by email.
Enter your preferences here.