4 New Risk and Compliance Functions Made Possible by Advanced Technologies

When risk and compliance technology is discussed, it is often in the context of how much improvement the technology can bring about in an organization’s current risk and compliance processes. What often gets lost in this conversation is the fact that risk and compliance technology does much more beyond increasing the pace of existing processes; it also delivers new functionalities and abilities that can prove to be extremely useful for banks and other financial institutions.

The new functions included in risk and compliance technology solutions help risk and compliance managers by allowing them to easily monitor processes, get insights into performance, visualize data, and much more. Here are some of the most exciting new features that bankers love in modern risk and compliance solutions:

1 – In-Depth Performance Metrics

It can be incredibly difficult to create a performance improvement program for risk and compliance because such programs need to be trackable. Waiting to see the results of the improvements at the end of the year when the annual report is prepared is not preferred. Risk and compliance solutions include activity management and issue handling features. The system tracks when each issue was opened and how long it stayed open for.

This means that there are many different performance metrics available to management when it comes to risk and compliance. Management can see how long it takes the bank on average to mitigate a risk or close a compliance issue. These metrics can be tracked in real-time, giving the bank a live view of their performance and providing the opportunity to proactively eliminate any problems or and speed up delayed projects.

2 – Enhanced Predictions and Insights

When risk and compliance are being managed manually, it is difficult to ensure that the previous quarter’s metrics are accurately reported and presented. Risk and compliance technology make keeping track of historical metrics trivially easy and goes beyond hindsight to enable foresight as well. Risk and compliance solutions can take in historical data, reveal trends, and enable bankers to extend the metrics beyond today’s data to get more insights and predictions for the next quarter. Banks can discover risk domains that may not be problematic right now but need to be managed for the next quarter.

3 – Data to Slice and Dice

What isn’t talked about enough is how risk and compliance solutions change the relationship between bankers and data. In the absence of risk and compliance technology, each data point relating to performance metrics needs to be manually assessed. This creates a dearth of data, which makes it harder for risk and compliance managers to create any big picture assessments from the data, as only the data that is critical for reporting is captured.

Risk and compliance solutions automatically capture and generate data regarding performance, risk issues, compliance levels, and much more. Instead of working hard to capture the necessary data, risk and compliance officers find a treasure trove of data they can experiment with and analyze. This gives them the opportunity to go more in-depth than ever before and discover risk and compliance issues that may have otherwise not surfaced until much later.

4 – Real-Time Monitoring

Bank management has never had much visibility into risk and compliance functions – they have usually relied on periodic reports generated by the risk and compliance departments. Risk and compliance technology enable real-time monitoring of risk and compliance processes and issues. There are executive dashboards built-in some of the modern risk and compliance solutions. These dashboards can be customized to show the most important performance metrics from across the organization.

The implications of these dashboards are profound. While on the surface these dashboards simply present data, in essence they change the way managers overlook and manage risk and compliance within the bank. Instead of relying on outdated reports, managers can now see how well the bank is managing compliance and mitigating risks in real-time. Problems, instead of being discovered at the end of the month or quarter, become apparent as soon as they occur.

In other words, instead of managing risk and compliance reactively based on performance in the previous quarter, banks can manage risk and compliance proactively, ensuring that there are no performance gaps in any process of function. The real-time monitoring also fosters a culture of risk ownership within the organization as each employee now knows that risks are being monitored and any problem that occurs will be visible to the rest of the organization.

Features like these help banks and financial institutions increase the quality of their risk and quality processes while reducing costs. Interested in how your bank can implement risk and compliance technology? Get in touch with our experts for a demonstration.