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25/06/2026 12:59 am
TL;DR: Financial controls rely on access limits, segregation of duties, approvals, reconciliations, and audits to prevent errors and fraud, according to Pathlock. The same governance pattern maps directly to identity programmes: when access, approval, and review are misaligned, financial risk becomes identity risk, not just accounting risk.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Pathlock: What are Financial Controls?
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams separate approval and execution in high-risk workflows?
A: Security teams should design workflows so no single identity can request, approve, and complete the same high-risk action.
Q: Why do segregation of duties controls fail in practice?
A: They usually fail when role design, ownership records, and system permissions drift apart.
Q: How do organisations know whether financial or identity controls are actually working?
A: They know by reconciling approvals, actual execution, and exception patterns over time.
Practitioner guidance
- Separate request, approval, and execution roles Review financial and identity workflows for any path where one person or account can create, approve, and execute the same action.
- Use transaction thresholds to force second approval Set monetary and access thresholds that trigger dual approval for high-risk actions such as large payments, new vendors, privilege elevation, and sensitive entitlement changes.
- Reconcile approvals against actual outcomes Compare approved transactions with executed transactions, then compare entitlements with actual access use.
What's in the full article
Pathlock's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Detailed examples of preventive, detective, and corrective financial control patterns across cash, payroll, and vendor payments
- Step-by-step guidance for segregation of duties and approval limits in ERP and finance workflows
- Practical control design examples for reconciliations, internal audits, and variance analysis
- Implementation notes on manual versus automated controls and how they affect auditability
👉 Read Pathlock's guide to financial controls and governance patterns →
Financial controls and access limits: what IAM teams should notice?
Explore further
25/06/2026 10:08 am
Financial control failures often start as identity control failures. The article’s core message is that errors, fraud, and policy drift are prevented when access, approval, and review are separated. That is the same governance pattern IAM teams use for privileged access and lifecycle control. When a single identity can create, approve, and settle a transaction, the control model is already broken. Practitioners should read financial controls as a reminder that identity separation is a governance requirement, not an operational preference.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- A separate finding from the same research shows that only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in their ability to secure NHIs, which is a governance confidence gap as much as a tooling gap.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when a control failure leads to fraud or unauthorised access?
A: Accountability should sit with the business owner of the control, not just the system administrator. Finance, IAM, and audit all need to know who owns the rule, who reviews exceptions, and who approves remediation. If no one is clearly accountable, the control will fail again because no one is responsible for closure.
👉 Read our full editorial: Financial controls expose the governance gap in access and approval
