Emily Lai

Emily has more than 20 years of risk advisory experience in several 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, manufacturing, 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.

Prior to GT SG, she had worked for the big 4 accounting firms in the United States, Australia, Greater China and ASEAN regions for more than 16 years.  During her last work tenure with the big 4 accounting firm in Singapore, she was the Internal Audit Competency Leader for the Financial Services Office, 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:

• Managed internal audits and internal controls projects for clients in banking, capital market, payment services, telecommunications and trading houses where the audit reviews include in evaluating their business processes across entity wide to achieve improvements in efficiency, business outcomes and better risk management and internal controls.
• Led controls validations, control optimization and rationalization projects in the design, implementation and testing for companies in various industries including the financial institutions to improve efficiency and effectiveness of their business operations locally and globally for various business, operational and financial processes including the entity level controls and the on-going monitoring and robustness of the internal controls and AML training programs.
• 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.
• Led team to work with global commodity trading houses and payment services to assist them in development of financial, operational and compliance policies, and standard operating procedures (“P&P”) and introduced leading practices to enhance their business operations and strengthened compliance and corporate governance.
• Led various teams from Singapore (SG), London and India for a multi million-dollar financial crime compliance project for the UK regulator on a global bank headquartered in London and Singapore.
• Led an integrated APAC team for a global risk and controls transformation project for multilateral development bank headquartered in Beijing and successfully led the bank to achieve its first Internal Control over Financial Reporting (“ICFR”) certification within 18 months. Also helped the bank in establishing their own internal control team for transition handover and knowledge transfer. 
• Led teams to perform audit inspections of regulatory audits for licensed financial advisory firm in Singapore where the scope of work includes validation of the management actions committed to the regulator including assessing the sustainability of the management actions.
• Leading various teams in conducting several quality assessment reviews on the internal audit functions of multi-national companies across various industries to provide value-adding areas of improvement to enhance work quality and achieve improvement in efficiency, business outcomes and strengthened internal controls and risk management.
• Contributed to various articles published in The Business Times, Today and other news publisher on regulatory compliance and risks for FI industries.