Web Site: www.reliantaudit.com
Headquarters: Laguna Niguel, California
Year Founded: 2006
Founder: Dipak Shah
Investors: Privately funded
Employees: 26
Company News: www.reliantaudit.com/news_events
*Updated 6/24/08
By Dipak Shah
Reliant provides software and consulting services for chief audit executives who want to reduce the high cost, complexity and uncertainty of enterprise-wide audits. To effectively manage risk, auditors need efficient audit processes, reliable test data and continuous visibility into risks, controls and audit results at any time. Reliant delivers all of these and more with the only continuous risk management solution for auditors. With Reliant, organizations can continuously monitor controls, streamline audit operations, automate control testing and remediation, and implement a dynamic risk framework that shows up-to-the-minute status of audit programs. Using pre-packaged, standards-based controls for compliance, operational and financial audits, we help organizations reduce risk while gaining efficiency, quality, insight and assurance throughout the audit process.
Audit has traditionally been a labor-intensive effort that requires huge amounts of manpower and time at the end of every quarter and fiscal year. During this time, other operations can come to a screeching halt as resources are poured into the audit efforts. As everyone who has gone through an audit will tell you, this is not an efficient process. But there’s something else that gets lost; the business intelligence and business process management improvements that you can derive from continuous risk management.
And that’s how Reliant is different. It would be hard to find a company today that is looking at risk in a continuous manner. A controller may know the balance in bank accounts at any given time. Your COO may know the inventory at any time. There are even compliance managers who can look back and identify where risk has occurred using spreadsheets. However, if you ask a CEO or CFO if they know where the risks are high for their business on a given day, all they will have are some static reports from the past. This is where Reliant’s continuous risk management will fundamentally change how businesses view audit. We enable companies to observe, understand, manage, and remediate risk continuously throughout the quarter, instead of waiting until the end of the quarter for the avalanche of financial reports.
Reliant Solutions helps to improve efficiency, quality, insight and assurance throughout the audit process.
Reliant manages the audit process the same way Chief Audit Executives do: beginning with Risk Assessment, which drives the Audit Plan and Work Programs, which define in-scope Control Testing, which generate test data that is used to further evaluate risks. Reliant then uses an integrated Continuous Monitoring engine to feed real-time information about business transactions and operational conditions into the audit process, helping CAE’s to quickly and easily identify control violations as they occur. The results of work program steps, control tests, and risk assessments are all automatically updated in a Dynamic Risk Framework. While other approaches may help to automate one or two of these processes individually, only Reliant has created an end-to-end solution for the entire audit process.
My inspiration for starting the company came when I was a managing director with investment banking firm Morgan Keegan. As a banker, I encountered situations many times where we would be ready to do a deal, but the auditors and accountants would leave the company, even though the company was ready to launch an IPO or secondary offering, because there was a lack of visibility into the numbers. Our team would not be given clarity on the financials until the 11th hour. This experience in banking got me to thinking about how visible operations are to the executives at the top and whether or not they have a grasp of everything that is taking place. It was also about this time that Enron, Worldcomm and their ilk were grabbing all the headlines, for all the wrong reasons.
After I retired from Morgan Keegan in 2001, I knew I had a good hunch about a big market need but before I committed to building a business I talked to many CFO’s, and heads of Audit of companies in the Dow 30, including Boeing and Disney. What I heard reinforced my thinking about a possible market opportunity. When talking about assurance and visibility at the top, do executives have the same visibility and clarity into risk as they do about inventory and cash position? Today they don’t, which is what led me to launch Reliant.
Reliant targets the Chief Audit Executive at companies of any size, both public and private. One might think this is something for the accounting firms, but research has proven that these firms are not yet ready for automation. Reliant has been able to customize this tool for the internal catalysts, which are really the Chief Audit Executives and the CFOs.
We compete with several different categories of companies. First, in the GRC / Compliance framework space, which includes documentation and process management solutions designed specifically for the GRC process, we are the only solution to provide continuous controls monitoring, automated control testing and automated sampling. We do this within a dynamic framework that is automatically updated as controls are tested.
Then you have the continuous controls monitoring space, which includes solutions that monitor ERP transaction to detect controls violations. Reliant is the only solution that includes a robust risk and controls framework that provides true continuous auditing. Unlike our competitors in this space, our audit operations are automated and we have full enterprise risk assessments.
In the Segregation of Duties / ERP GRC space, you will find solutions that use embedded techniques to implement preventive controls primarily for SOD, but that can also address master data controls and configuration management. Here we are separated from our competitors by our ground up focus on the audit executive when we were developing the solution. Unlike our competitors we automate audit operations and enable continuous auditing. We have strong continuous monitoring and an integrated risk and control framework that address operational, financial, entity and value-add controls. And all of this is supported in heterogeneous environments.
In the Analytics and Fraud Detection space, solutions are offered that perform data extraction from any data source and apply complex analytic rules to identify fraud patterns. We’re the only company in this space to offer a risk/control framework with support for audit plan management or business risk assessment and an executive dashboard with comprehensive reporting—again, designed with the Chief Audit Executive in mind from the beginning.
And finally, the documentation and content management solution providers offer multi-dimensional repositories with complex workflow and version control capabilities for broad enterprise use beyond just compliance. But what these folks provide is “generic” documentation repositories with workflow engines, not designed for auditors, audit processes, compliance or corporate controls. Additionally, these solutions require extensive customization to support audit operations and risk management, with no support for transaction monitoring or continuous auditing. Reliant does all of this, while being easy and much more cost effective to implement.
In the next iteration of our solution, you’ll see us expand our library to include measurement, value-add and vertical industry and regulatory controls.
What do you think about Reliant Solutions? Leave your comments below. Feedback about StartUp Beat?—email us at editor@startupbeat.com
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