Internal Control and Banking Operational Risk in the Digital Era: A Systematic Review, Bibliometric Analysis, and Integrative Framework Proposal (Revue du contrôle, de la comptabilité et de l’audit)

Summary

• From 364 documents retrieved from Scopus, the PRISMA 2020 protocol led to selecting 42 articles for bibliometric and thematic analysis.p.2
• Initial screening of 364 documents excluded 280 records, including 240 for absence of link with the review object and 37 for ineligible document types.p.8
• Full-text evaluation of 84 articles led to the exclusion of 42 studies, resulting in a final corpus of 42 articles divided into 24 primary and 18 contextual studies.p.8
• The most cited article in the corpus, authored by Abbasi et al. (2021), garnered 138 citations.p.13
• The category of internal controls and operational risks is the most explored topic, comprising 13 articles representing 31,0 % of the corpus.p.19
• Corporate governance and bank performance represent 7 articles or 16,7 % of the corpus, while digitalization and banking innovation account for 5 articles or 11,9 %.p.20

Key insights

1. The PRISMA 2020 protocol guided the selection of 42 articles from 364 documents extracted from Scopus to analyze internal control and operational risk in banking.p.2
2. A total of 84 full-text articles were evaluated, leading to 42 exclusions due to speculative approaches, non-banking settings, redundancy, or lack of direct focus.p.8
3. The corpus exhibits high editorial dispersion across 32 distinct journals, with no single journal publishing more than 3 articles.p.12
4. The United States leads the geographical distribution with 12 articles featuring at least one American affiliation, followed by the United Kingdom with 7 articles.p.15
5. Cooccurrence analysis of author keywords identifies operational risk with 20 occurrences and internal controls with 10 occurrences as core nodes.p.17
6. The internal controls and operational risks thematic category constitutes the largest research group, comprising 13 articles or 31,0 % of the corpus.p.19
7. The study introduces the Internal Control 4.0 framework combining smart technology, operational ethics, dynamic resilience, and integrated governance across 8 testable research propositions.p.32