How ING Uses KNIME to Speed up Audit Planning, Testing, and Reporting

A Complex Audit Landscape

At ING, internal audit means covering thousands of controls, hundreds of processes, and dozens of systems across a global banking footprint. In raw numbers: 400+ auditors, 1,288 auditable entities, 400 audits each year, with 6-10 weeks lead time per audit.

This complexity means auditors deal with tangled processes, inconsistent data sources, and unpredictable risks. Rather than simplifying the business, which was outside their control, ING's internal audit focused on making it simpler to audit — with KNIME as the backbone of their analytics-first approach.

“They tell you what a business should look like… but reality is more like this. Very complex data structure, data environment, and process flows which look like spaghetti.”Tjasse Biewenga, Head of Data Analytics, CAS ING

Solving Key Audit Challenges with KNIME

Making process mining accessible to all 400+ auditors

Challenge: Understanding business process flows is essential in internal audits, but process mining tools were expensive and limited to a single license.

Solution: ING built its own process mining tool using KNIME data apps. Now, auditors simply upload event logs and instantly visualize real process flows — no specialist software required.

“We built something tailored for us and made it available for four hundred auditors...”Matheus Toscano, Audit Manager, CAS ING

Result:

• Democratized process mining across the team of 400+ auditors.
• Eliminated expensive licensing costs for dedicated process mining tools.
• Enabled faster discovery of process inefficiencies.

Outlier detection for smarter sampling

Challenge: Sampling for audits was often random, risking missed anomalies.

Solution: ING developed an outlier detection tool with KNIME. It uses multiple methods to highlight unusual transactions, allowing auditors to focus on what matters most.

Result:

• Faster anomaly detection. Auditors get meaningful results in minutes, reducing risk and shortening time to insight.

Automating the audit planning process

Challenge: Preparing an audit plan was repetitive and time-consuming. For each audit, teams needed to gather data, create charts, and write summaries — across 450+ audits a year, this work added up.

Solution: ING broke the process into phases:

• Phase 1: Auto-generate a template document with pre-populated audit info.
• Phase 2: Automate data gathering, charts, and tables using KNIME.
• Phase 3 (in progress): Add Gen AI to draft assessments and reporting language.

Result:

• Estimated to save 400 hours annually on planning docs alone.
• Freed auditors to focus on higher-value work.

“If you save one hour in the journey to create this document, you're saving 400 hours a year, which is in a way… ten weeks of a person that could be applied somewhere else.”Matheus Toscano, Audit Manager, CAS ING

Document and sanctions screening: automating compliance checks

Challenge: Reviewing trade finance documents for sanctions compliance was tedious and manual, especially when dealing with poorly scanned files.

Solution: ING built KNIME workflows that:

• Automatically scan, read and cross-reference documents using OCR.
• Identify entities (e.g., ship names, people) for sanctions screening.
• Highlight missing or low-confidence data by color-coding them automatically.

Result:

• Improved accuracy in sanctions screening.
• Freed up auditors from time-consuming and error-prone manual document reviews.

Integrated data acquisition and automated testing

Challenge: Audit data came from fragmented sources — emails, Excel files, and protected systems — making testing slow and inconsistent. In some cases, it took up to 8 weeks to gather the data before testing could begin.

Solution: Using KNIME, ING automated data acquisition, standardized testing logic, and wrote results directly into their audit management system.

Result:

• Allowing direct connection to data sources, reducing manual data collection and prep to near-instant access in recurring audits.
• Standardized testing logic across teams, improving audit consistency.
• Reduced GDPR compliance risk by keeping sensitive data off laptops.
• Improved traceability of audit evidence, speeding up audits and enhancing regulatory compliance.

Lessons Learned: What It Takes to Scale Analytics in Audit

After several years of scaling audit analytics, ING shared some key lessons:

• Divide & Conquer: Build modular solutions auditors can reuse.
• Look for Value: Don’t automate everything — only what solves a business problem.
• Adapt to Change: Build tools flexible enough to evolve as audit needs grow.

And perhaps the simplest — but most important — lesson:

“Use it or lose it.” If auditors don’t apply KNIME soon after learning it, the skills fade. ING builds opportunities for auditors to use analytics regularly.

“That’s the strategy. It’s about flexibility, scalability and reusability.”Tjasse Biewenga, Head of Data Analytics, CAS ING

Results: Efficiency, Scale, and Empowerment

By investing in reusable, accessible KNIME solutions, ING managed to:

• Reduce the workload of individual auditors from 3 days to 15 minutes.
• Save an estimated 400 hours annually in audit planning document creation alone.
• Apply analytics to 65%-70% of audits, with a goal of reaching 85% in the coming years.
• Empower 400+ auditors to analyze their own data instead of waiting on specialists.
• Reduce total cost of ownership by replacing multiple expensive niche tools with KNIME.

Learn more about KNIME Business Hub and how it can help your organization or schedule a demo with our customer care team to see how it works in practice.