We live in an era where data has become one of the biggest commodities. Some of the biggest businesses in the world achieved success by using data. Any business that wants to get more out of its risk and compliance efforts also needs to realize the importance of data and what it can do for their organization.

What makes data so important?

Data is such an important commodity because data can provide answers not available elsewhere and can allow businesses to leave the competition behind. Businesses have started to mine their own data to get more predictions and insights out of it. This isn’t limited to any one type of business – data is being used to improve the customer experience and predict market movements in almost every industry in the world.

Google uses collected location data to tell its users about traffic and road closures. Target uses customer data to predict demand and to recommend products customers would genuinely be interested in buying – their profiling works so great that their system knows if a customer is pregnant and they can then recommend pregnancy related products to the customers. Data is important because it allows businesses to get in-depth answers not just to the questions they ask, but also questions they didn’t even know they should ask. Modern enterprise solutions can detect problematic trends and alert management to issues they were unaware about.

Risk and compliance data

The fact that data contains insights and analysis which can uncover issues and predict future events means that it can have a profound effect on risk and compliance. There are numerous examples of processes where data analysis can help risk and compliance. Our compliance and risk solutions are a great example – Predict360 keeps a track of customer complaints. If customer complaints are increasing in a particular domain then the system automatically alerts to the management and increases its risk rating of that business domain.

Instead of finding out about problems after an audit, managers can find out about issues and concerns when the data suggests that something is wrong.

Why is risk and compliance data not being utilized?

While most businesses realize the importance of risk and compliance data only a few are actually able to utilize the data. The biggest obstacle they face is data preparation. Any software application or solution that analyzes data, needs the data to be standardized and properly formatted. Most businesses use general-purpose software like Microsoft Excel to keep risk and compliance data, which can create several problems for data analysis.

The problems include the data being in different formats and standards. Different departments may have different methodologies of storing data. Another problem is that the data is often manually captured, which means there is a chance of there being formatting issues and accuracy issues in the data. Locating all the data is another major issue; the data needs to be collected to be analyzed. In most businesses the reports may be shared between departments, but the actual data is seldom shared.

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How risk and compliance data can deliver better results

Getting more out of risk and compliance data requires businesses to rethink their data strategy. There needs to be a centralized system which helps the business to collect all the data and then analyze it in real time. While this does carry a cost, the reason businesses should bear it anyway is that the benefits of this process far outweigh the costs of this process. Software solutions that work with risk and compliance data are now easy and affordable to procure. Our solution Predict360 is cloud based, which means implementation costs are minimal and there are no hardware costs as the solution is maintained on the cloud by 360factors.

These solutions use risk and compliance data to help businesses with many different relevant processes. They help detect emerging risks and closely monitor risk data. They analyze compliance data to unearth issues and areas of concern. They minimize compliance violations by detecting compliance problems and allowing businesses to take corrective measures before any serious damages are caused to the organization.

We recently held a webinar on how banks can better identify, predict, and mitigate risks using data. Have more questions about what risk and compliance data can do for your organization? Get in touch with the 360factors team for a demo of what our solution can do.