Case Study: FirstRand Banking Group achieves comprehensive audit coverage and rapid data access with ACL data analytics

Firstrand Banking Group Enhanced Audit Coverage And Risk Management

First National Bank, a division of FirstRand Banking Group that manages over four million customer accounts across more than 1,000 branches in South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland and Namibia, faced slow, costly and incomplete audit data access. Internal auditors relied on hard‑copy branch printouts that sampled just 20 accounts, cost the bank and took two days to produce, preventing a comprehensive view of branch‑level risk and limiting the effectiveness of annual reviews.

To solve this, Bennie Smit implemented ACL data analytics to join the required data tables (over 16 GB), giving auditors fast, unrestricted access to complete account data. The change reduced data retrieval from two days to about 15 minutes, enabled monitoring of all four million accounts, produced complete exception lists, and allowed identification and prioritization of high‑risk branches—strengthening audit coverage and risk management.

FirstRand Banking Group

Bennie Smit

Data Extraction Specialist