IT Audit and Cyber Security Assurance in Karachi

Why the assurance burden is heaviest here

An institution headquartered in Karachi typically answers to several audiences at once, and they do not ask the same question. The State Bank supervises the banks, DFIs and microfinance banks under its technology governance framework. The SECP oversees listed companies and insurers. The external auditor tests IT general controls every cycle because the financial statement opinion depends on them. And increasingly, international correspondent banks and enterprise customers run their own security due diligence before they will transact.

The practical consequence is that the same control environment gets examined repeatedly, by people asking different questions in different vocabularies. Institutions that scope each of these separately end up producing the same evidence three or four times a year, with the same people pulled off their day jobs each time.

We scope with all the audiences in mind from the start. One evidence collection exercise, mapped to each framework that applies, reported separately in each framework's own structure. On a multi-obligation engagement that is usually the single largest cost saving available.

What we are most often asked to do in this market

• SBP technology governance framework gap assessment and internal audit for commercial banks, Islamic banks, DFIs and microfinance banks — including support for the quarterly board review the framework requires.
• IT general controls audit over core banking platforms and the infrastructure beneath them, scoped to support external audit reliance.
• SWIFT CSP independent assessment for institutions on the network, timed to leave room for remediation before the attestation deadline.
• Application control and segregation of duties review inside the core banking platform, which is where the highest-value findings in this sector consistently sit.
• Digital channel assurance — internet banking, mobile applications and the APIs behind them, tested rather than reviewed on paper.
• ISO 27001:2022 gap assessment, usually triggered by an enterprise customer or a correspondent relationship rather than by a regulator.
• Co-sourced IT internal audit for functions whose annual plan contains technology coverage they have no specialist to deliver.

The findings that recur in Karachi engagements

Across banking and insurance work in this market, the same weaknesses appear with enough regularity to be worth naming in advance. None are exotic, and none require significant investment to fix — they require discipline and a record.

• Privileged access to core banking granted for a migration or an incident and never revoked afterwards.
• Emergency change procedures used routinely rather than exceptionally, with approval documented retrospectively if at all.
• User access recertification performed as a formality — managers approving lists they have not read, and removals that are agreed but never actioned.
• Recovery objectives published in the continuity plan that the backup regime has never been technically capable of meeting.
• Third-party technology arrangements governed carefully at contract signature and not monitored thereafter.
• Test and reporting environments populated with unmasked production data, under materially weaker controls than production.

Working alongside your external auditor

Where the objective is to support external audit reliance, introduce us at their planning stage rather than after fieldwork. Reliance is always the external auditor's decision, but it is far more likely when the scope, the sampling basis and the documentation standard were agreed in advance instead of justified afterwards.

We document to ISACA ITAF standards with retained evidence, and we establish population completeness independently before drawing any sample. Both are prerequisites for reliance, and both are where locally produced working papers most often fall short.

How engagements are delivered here

Walkthroughs, control owner interviews, observation and the closing meeting are performed onsite. Documentation review, testing analysis and report drafting are performed remotely, which controls cost without weakening the evidence. Where your policy requires all work onsite we will price it that way and tell you the difference rather than absorbing it quietly.

For institutions in the financial district, fieldwork is usually structured around your month-end and reporting calendar rather than ours. Tell us the weeks that are impossible and we will plan around them.