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Emily Lai
Partner - Head of Business Risk Services

Emily Lai

Emily has over 17 years of risk advisory experience in a number of different industries including, financial institutions (banks, insurance, asset management, payment services, derivatives commodities trading and exchange and clearing houses), oil and gas, metals and resources, consumers and industrial products, and telecommunication.

She specialises in enterprise-wide risk management, internal audit and internal controls, systems process reviews and improvement, regulatory and gaps analysis reviews, financial crime compliance, contracts and joint venture reviews, internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR), Sarbanes Oxley (SOX 404) and operational risks.

Emily has previously worked in the Big 4 accounting firms in the United States, Australia, Greater China and ASEAN regions where she has led many large complex projects that helped companies transform risk and compliance into opportunities to drive sustainable value and allow their worldwide operations to be more risk adept.

Some of Emily's experience includes:

  • Managing internal audits and internal controls projects for clients where the audit reviews include evaluating their business processes to achieve improvements in efficiency, business outcomes and better risk management and internal controls.
  • Facilitating risk assessment workshops with companies’ senior management teams and key stakeholders to identify their enterprise-wide risks and potential action plans for the development of a group-wide risk register and internal audit plan.
  • Managing several regulatory compliance gap analysis against key regulatory requirements such as MAS guidelines/notices on outsourcing and AML/CFT as well as mapping of regulatory obligations and providing recommendations to remediate the gaps and where controls may be strengthened.
  • Global workstream leader where she led various teams from Singapore (SG), London and India for a multiple millions of dollars financial crime compliance (FCC) project for the regulator on a global financial institution for over four years
  • Leading an integrated APAC team for a global risk and controls transformation project for a multilateral development bank, in China for over three years, where she was also instrumental in helping to establish an internal control team for the client for transition and internal knowledge transfer
  • Leading a control optimization project for a big mining company in the design, implementation and testing of their global operational and financial processes in Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines for their IPO listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange
  • Leading various teams in conducting several quality assessment reviews on the internal audit functions of multi-national companies across various industries. These reviews provided value-adding areas of improvement to further enhance the work quality and assisted the internal audit function to achieve improvement in efficiency, business outcomes and strengthened their internal controls and risk management.
Qualifications
  • Bachelor Degree in Accounting and Finance
  • Certified Practicing Accountant, Australia (“CPA Australia”)
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Emily Lai
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Emily Lai
Partner - Head of Business Risk Services
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