Professional Networking Events

Many thanks to Andrea and Joe and the Robert Walters team for sponsoring our event.

Presentation Topic: Risk Assurance at Westpac

Risk Assurance is a new team at Westpac New Zealand placed in the second line of defence of the bank. The goal of Risk Assurance is to provide assurance services across the bank including its subsidiaries. This team has been specially created to bring about benefits such as standardised assurance, reporting and analysis of the bank’s control environment, a consistent approach to controls testing and raising issues, efficiencies in assurance coverage by eliminating gaps and overlaps across the three lines of defence and to enhance the objectivity in challenging management’s identification and assessment of risks, obligations and controls. In achieving this goal, Risk Assurance faces both opportunities and challenges along the way.

The presentation will cover the following topics:

•    Who is Risk Assurance
•    Why Risk Assurance exists
•    What Risk Assurance does
•    How Risk Assurance differs from Audit
•    The journey so far
•    Opportunities
•    Challenges ahead

Speakers: Michelle Theron, Head of Risk Assurance and Pinsara Galpottage, Senior Manager Controls Assurance, Risk Assurance, Westpac New Zealand

Michelle joined Westpac as Head of Risk Assurance in April 2017. She has over 20-years’ experience across internal, external audit and compliance roles, focused on banking and life insurance. Prior to joining Westpac Michelle worked for BNZ, Sovereign, ASB, EY and Deloitte. She gained experienced across various industries in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa with deeper specialisation in Compliance and anti-money Laundering frameworks, as well as regulatory affairs. Michelle is a Chartered Accountant, Certified Internal Auditor and Certified Anti-money laundering specialist

Pinsara is a Senior Manager within the Risk Assurance team at Westpac New Zealand having previously worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers New Zealand, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Deloitte New Zealand. During his time at Deloitte he spent 2 years gaining deeper financial services industry experience in the United Kingdom. He specialises in risk and governance, regulatory and process compliance, technology and information security in the banking and financial services industry with experience in New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom. He is a Chartered Accountant, Certified Information Systems Auditor, Certified Information Systems Security Professional and a PRINCE2 Practitioner.

We hope you will be able to join us for this event!  Details are listed below:

Date:          17 April 2018 (Tuesday)
Time:         12:30pm to 01:00pm (Lunch)
                   01:00pm to 1:45pm (Presentation)
Venue:      PWC Tower, Level 22, 188 Quay Street, Auckland

Please register using Eventbrite by Thursday, 12th April 2018.