The FISA Self-Assessment is now ready to support New Zealand financial entities to assess and improve their integrity systems. It will be launched on October 18th 2022. TINZ is proud to be leading this initiative to provide New Zealand financial organisations with a means to review their culture and conduct.
This online assessment is free and open for use by financial organisations. The assessment provides a framework for continuous improvement of the culture and conduct in the financial sector - banks, insurance companies, supervisors, Kiwisaver providers, financial service providers, credit unions, building societies, regulators and others.
Its use will demonstrate how civil society and business can work together to strengthen the integrity of our financial system.
How can Financial Organisations sign up for FISA?
Access to the FISA online self-assessment is available to financial sector organizations. Please contact our FISA team at fisa@discrimen.nz to register your interest and receive access.
The tool is not open to organisations outside of the financial sector. We need to ensure a comparable measure for assessment and many questions are sector specific.
FISA Go-Live
FISA will go live on 18th October. View the Wellington Go-Live event livestream on Zoom.
What does the self-assessment cover?
There are nine focus areas: governance, accountability, policy oversight, communications, human capital, customer services, risk monitoring, operations and procurement. Benchmark questions are included in each section. Questions are self-scored, with responses verified against publicly available information. The tool identifies best practice behaviours (the benchmarks) and then scores the organisation against that benchmark.
What do organisations receive?
On completion of the assessment each participating organisation will receive an automatically-generated report on their benchmark performance and a copy of their scored answers. Over time participants will be able to see their performance against other (aggregated, anonymised) organisations in industry cohorts.
TINZ encourages a facilitated team approach to the assessment, to promote discussion on strengths, weaknesses and actions.This is a valuable exercise on its own.TINZ can recommend trained facilitators.
Security
The tool is held in a secure database. TINZ will not publish individual organisation results. TINZ will only receive and report publicly on aggregated anonymized data. Data provided by respondents is subject to strict security standards including US–EU Safe Harbour and SSAE16/SOC-2 certification.
Benefits of FISA
The FISA tool assists financial organisations to examine how well they implement integrity practices that shape and strengthen culture and conduct across their organisations — and how they can improve further. If proactively applied, these practices contribute to the prevention of corruption, enhance the mana of the organisation and nurture trust with consumers and stakeholders.This also makes them more attractive to responsible investors. All of this is good for business.
TINZ aims
TINZ aims for this project are:
- Improved integrity practices within financial organisations
- Stronger trust and confidence of customers and stakeholders
- Improved integrity of the broader New Zealand financial system
