The Senior Specialist, Internal Audit – Financial & Data Analytics plays a critical role in delivering high value, data driven internal audit and advisory engagements. This role is heavily focused on financial analysis, performance insights, and advanced data analytics, integrating FP&A skillsets into internal audit work to enhance risk coverage, anomaly detection, and business insight.

The role partners closely with Finance, FP&A, and business stakeholders to evaluate financial integrity, forecasting accuracy, management reporting, and key financial risks through analytics enabled audit techniques.

Key Responsibilities

Financial & FP&A Focused Audit Execution

• Lead and perform financial centric internal audits covering:

o Financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting processes

o Management reporting and key performance indicators (KPIs)

o Cost structures, margin analysis, and profitability drivers

o Revenue, expense, and working capital trends

• Evaluate the accuracy, completeness, and reasonableness of financial models, assumptions, and forecasts.

• Assess governance and controls over financial analysis, variance analysis, and performance tracking.

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Data Analytics & Continuous Risk Assessment

• Contribute to the development and maintenance of databases and data pipelines. This ensures data quality and accessibility for analysis.

• Extract data from various sources (databases, APIs, web scraping, etc.), clean it, and transform it into a usable format. This often involves dealing with challenging datasets that includes missing values, lump sum amounts, inconsistencies, and different data types/format.

• Design and execute data driven audit procedures using advanced analytics to:

o Identify anomalies, trends, and outliers in large financial datasets

o Perform end to end population testing rather than sample based testing

o Support continuous auditing and monitoring initiatives

• Build and maintain repeatable analytics scripts and audit routines.

• Predictive Modelling: Building ML models to forecast future outcomes based on historical data. This can involve machine learning techniques like regression, classification, and clustering.

• Create dashboards to aid in continuous monitoring efforts or present audit findings.

• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate audit objectives into data questions and analytical approaches.

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Internal Audit & Risk Advisory

• Lead or supervise audit engagements from planning through reporting, including:

o Risk assessment and scoping

o Audit program design with a strong analytics component

o Results communication and issue validation

• Provide forward looking insights beyond control gaps, highlighting:

o Process inefficiencies

o Financial risks and opportunities

o Data quality or reporting reliability issues

• Support ad hoc management and Board level requests involving financial analysis.

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Stakeholder Management & Collaboration

• Act as a trusted partner to Finance, FP&A, and business teams.

• Present audit findings and analytical insights clearly to senior management.

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Process Improvement & Innovation

• Drive the integration of advanced analytics and automation into internal audit methodology.

• Identify opportunities to:

o Improve financial controls through data insights

o Enhance audit efficiency through scripting and visualization

• Stay current on data analytics tools, finance transformation trends, and audit innovation.

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Required Qualifications & Experience

Education & Certifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, Business Analytics, Economics, or related field

• Professional qualifications preferred, such as:

o CPA / CA

o CIA

o CFA (or partial completion)

o CISA (analytics heavy roles)

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Experience

• 4–7 years of experience in:

o Internal audit, external audit, FP&A, or financial analysis

• Demonstrated experience in financial planning, forecasting, and performance analysis.

• Hands on experience applying data analytics in audit or finance roles.

• Prior experience supervising or mentoring junior team members is preferred.

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Technical & Analytics Skills

Finance & Audit

• Strong understanding of:

o Financial statements and management reporting

o Budgeting, forecasting, and variance analysis

o Internal controls and risk management frameworks

Data Analytics & Tools

• Advanced proficiency in one or more of the following:

o SQL

o Power BI (DAX and Power Query) / Tableau

o Python / R (for Machine Learning and advance statistical analysis)

o Advanced Excel (Power Query, Power Pivot, VBA)

• Experience working with:

o Large ERP datasets (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Teradata)

o Snowflake

o Financial and planning systems

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Key Competencies

• Strong analytical mindset with attention to detail

• Ability to translate complex data into clear business insights

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills

• Proactive, curious, and comfortable challenging assumptions

• Ability to balance audit rigor with commercial awareness

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Why Join This Role

• Exposure to finance leadership and strategic decision making

• Opportunity to shape the future of analytics driven internal audit

• Blend of assurance and value adding advisory work

• Continuous learning across data, finance, and audit disciplines