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A timely conversation about the evolution of audit confirmation processing, including trends, challenges and expectations impacting banks as key evidence providers, with Tim Pannell, VP of The Partner Network and Member Engagement at the American Banker's Association, and Dennis Moore, VP Financial Institutions at Circit.
For many banks, their strategic priorities include enhancing their digital capabilities to improve the client experience and investing in advanced technologies like AI to improve automation and operational efficiencies.
If there is one process within banks that has changed the least while everything around it has changed the most, it is audit confirmations. Over time, the process moved from stacks of paper and certified mail to email threads with PDFs attached, to today’s patchwork of portals and point solutions. On the surface, that looks like progress. In practice, most banks have simply moved the same manual, disconnected process onto a screen.
That distinction matters more than it might seem, because it's the root of a conversation happening in bank operations, audit, and compliance departments right now: are we actually digital, or have we just digitized the paperwork?
Three key takeaways
01 Prioritize processes
If banks are serious about going through a digital transformation, it's best to prioritize specific processes, like audit confirmations, that are traditionally very resource and time intensive and highly manual, but are ripe for automation and can deliver quick wins for the bank.
02 A service decision, not a channel decision
Banks pulling ahead in this space have made a simple but important shift in thinking: audit confirmation processing isn't a channel decision, it's a service decision. And service means meeting your clients and their auditors where they already are, not requiring them to adapt to the bank's internal preference.
03 Matching and exceeding expectations
Modernizing and streamlining the audit confirmation process directly addresses the pressures every bank operations leader is under: doing more with a flat or shrinking headcount, lowering the cost of manual processing, protecting margin, and giving clients a level of service that matches expectations set by every other digital interaction they have with the bank.
"A channel decision asks: "Where does the request live?"
A service decision asks "How much friction did we actually remove for the client, the auditor, and our own team?"
Question 1: How has the audit and banking landscape evolved over the years, including how audit confirmation requests are processed, and what role do you see technology playing?
"A lot of banks have digitized the paperwork. Very few have automated the work behind it, and that’s the difference between a form on a screen and an actual digital transformation."
In the old world, confirmation requests still largely moved by mail, fax, or email, with a bank operations team manually matching a letter to an account, stamping it, and mailing it back. That process hasn't changed much in decades, even though everything else in banking has gone digital.
Most banks have made real progress cutting out fax and physical mail, and many are actively trying to get off email too. That's a good and necessary step, but it's worth being precise about what it actually solves. Getting requests onto a screen instead of a fax machine is digitizing a form. It's not the same as automating the work behind it.
That distinction matters: a true digital transformation isn't just "Where does the request land?". Instead, it's "How much of the manual work around that request goes away?" Does the data get pulled automatically from the bank's core systems, or does someone still have to manually look it up and key it in? Does the request route itself to the right person and track status, or does it just sit in a queue waiting for someone to notice it? That second layer - the workflow and the data automation - is where the real efficiency lives.
So where does technology fit? The opportunity now is connecting confirmation requests directly to core banking data via API, and building workflow around who inside the bank needs to act, in what order, with visibility into status and not just giving auditors and clients a portal to submit and check a request.
That's where Circit comes in: we built our platform around that fuller definition: an encrypted digital channel with API connections into core systems and workflow built around how banks actually operate internally, not just a submission screen sitting on top of the same manual process.
Question 2: What are some of the top challenges most banks operations and customer support teams face that have them dreading the audit cycle each year?
"If you’re an operations leader dreading the next audit cycle, that dread is usually a sign the process is ready to be modernized, not that it’s too risky to touch."
Volume spikes with no relief valve: confirmation requests pile up seasonally, but headcount doesn't flex with it. Teams are doing the same work, just more of it, in a shorter window.
Even on a "digital" channel, the manual work often just moved, not disappeared: a lot of banks adopted a portal years ago and assumed that solved it. But if someone still has to log into core systems, look up the account, and manually type the data into the confirmation, they've changed where the work happens, not how much work there is.
Another example of this is if there is no connection between the request and the bank's own workflow: a request lands on a screen, but there's no built-in path for who inside the bank should pick it up, escalate it, or approve it, so it still relies on someone manually routing it, chasing colleagues, and tracking status in a spreadsheet on the side.
Another challenge is manual matching and verification: confirming the right account, the right signer, the right letter of authority. This is done by hand, which is slow and error-prone, and errors mean rework and delay.
All the above put together create friction between client and auditor: clients get frustrated because it feels like a step backward compared to every other digital interaction they have with the bank; auditors get frustrated because turnaround times drag out fieldwork.
Question 3: If there are better tools out there, ones that have introduced new features and innovations that are likely a better fit for how banks operate today, why are some banks hesitating to adopt them?
"Having a screen to submit and respond to a request isn’t the same as automating the process. If your platform doesn’t connect to your core systems and doesn’t understand your internal workflow, you’ve digitized the paperwork. You haven’t automated the work."
The honest answer is that "we have a platform" and "we've automated the process" aren't the same claim.
"We already have a platform" is a channel answer, not an automation answer: many banks adopted a confirmation platform years ago mainly to get off fax and email. That was the right call at the time. But the reasonable next question is: has that platform kept up, or did the bank solve yesterday's problem (paper) and stop there?
The gap is usually underneath the screen, not on it: ask whether the platform actually connects to the bank's core systems (that is, pulling account data automatically via API) or whether staff are still logging in, looking up the account, and manually entering the response. A lot of first-generation confirmation portals are essentially a submission and response screen; they don't reach back into the bank's own systems to do the work for the team.
Another missing piece is workflows: a request landing in a portal isn't the same as a request that knows who inside the bank should handle it, escalates automatically if it stalls, and gives operations leadership visibility into where every request stands. Older platforms were generally built around giving the auditor and client a place to submit and check status, not around the bank's own internal process.
User experience and pace of investment matter too: some of the platforms banks standardized on early are older technology that hasn't seen much reinvestment, particularly after changing ownership, when a product like this can become one of many small pieces inside a much larger portfolio rather than the core focus. That tends to show up as a dated, harder-to-learn interface rather than the modern, intuitive experience staff expect from everything else they use day to day.
Here's a reframe for the bank: switching isn't "give up what we built". It's closing the gap between "We have a digital channel" and "We've actually automated the work." The banks furthest ahead are the ones treating that gap as the next project, not the finish line.
Listen to the full podcast episode on ABA's website here.
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