The COVID-19 pandemic affected the way businesses – including banks, credit unions, and fintechs – compete for customers. Now more than ever, developing new products, markets, channels, and partnerships with speed and agility is vital. But if your organization isn’t considering the impact on its risk profile, it might end up mismanaging and misreporting risk.
Risk and compliance teams can help keep your organization on the right path.
The way risk and compliance affect growth and speed has changed.
The world has changed, and 2020 highlighted the need to respond faster to emerging risks. But the COVID-19 pandemic changed ways financial services firms looked to drive growth.
Consider these examples of how the pandemic affected business and added new challenges for risk and compliance teams:
- Customers. Instead of making in-person visits, customers frequently conduct business online, use call centers, or turn to less traditional options, such as banking-as-a-service apps, alternative lending, and cryptocurrency.
- New products. Rather than building and developing technology, financial services companies are buying products or partnering with more and different types of third-party companies.
- Employees. Additional levels of risk related to data security and privacy are introduced with more people working remotely outside of traditional, company-controlled offices.
- Regulations. The pandemic ushered in new regulations and new levels of scrutiny that are expected to increase as more people return to the workplace.
An integrated approach to risk management can help you face the new challenges of a post-pandemic world.
Can your organization identify the challenges that hold back speed and agility?
We've long understood – and have now confirmed – that financial services companies need to be dynamic and agile so they can quickly respond to new risks. Risk officers often struggle if they don’t have common processes or tools in place that can provide consistent communication and clarity into the issues organizations face.
Risk and compliance teams want to be responsive to business needs and move with speed, but they’re often slowed down by challenges such as:
- Risk silos
- Compliance
- Activity history
- Assessment preparation
- Reporting
Think of your business like a sports car and your risk and compliance teams as the brakes. In the past, brakes were only used to decelerate and stop. Now, though, advanced braking systems work in tandem with other parts of the car to optimize engine performance, handle turns better, and detect and mitigate potential accidents without sacrificing speed or safety.
Risk and compliance teams need to evolve as well. If your organization’s approach isn’t coordinated and its data isn’t standardized, then it might not be fully informed or able to support decisions that affect future strategies. With integrated risk management, your business will be better able to mitigate risk and move forward at a faster speed.
Roadblocks can be overcome with an integrated approach to risk management.
An integrated approach to risk management has the potential to increase visibility, collaboration, communication, and efficiency across your organization. Risk management teams have an opportunity to be a part of innovation and propel the pace of initiatives.
Integrated risk management can help drive growth and increase speed to market for new initiatives by:
- Providing better risk reporting for leadership with less time spent manually preparing reports
- Sharing a better picture of residual risk to help prioritize efforts
- Growing your risk capacity without needing to grow your risk team
- Confidently collaborating with third parties to supplement capabilities and increase growth potential
A centralized platform can provide data-driven insights into the important areas you manage, including brand, third-party relationships, data, products, services, and more. And as risk management becomes more mature and integrated, you can spend less time protecting the value you already have and more time building new value.
Crowe IRM-as-a-Service can help enable growth and speed.
We have created Crowe IRM-as-a-Service to be a right-sized, streamlined technology solution that scales as your business grows and offers the essential components and tools needed for effective risk and compliance activities.
The platform comes preloaded with content and use cases, so it’s ready to use within days of purchasing instead of months or years. With Crowe IRM-as-a-Service, you can confidently tackle new risk management challenges and focus on driving new business.
Want to learn more about our approach to integrated risk management? We would be happy to chat with you about your specific needs and discuss how to mature your risk and compliance approach.
