What is your business’ attitude to risk?
Whether you are risk averse, or comfortable with a certain level of risk, will determine how you approach risk management. In reality, businesses cannot eliminate compliance risk entirely, but they can reduce it if tackled intelligently. Risk managers must accept compliance risk as a fact of life. But, for peace of mind, risk levels need to sit within set tolerance parameters.
Intelligent risk management allows your business to develop a compliance culture. It acknowledges the wider effect that compliance incidents can have. Both on the direction of the business and brand, as well as operational and cost efficiencies.
Intelligent compliance
Intelligent compliance and risk management allows organisations to predict and manage risk by identifying and alleviating threats. It should be carried out on a regular basis to identify and manage the impact of risk incidents.
Being able to quantify and mitigate risk across the KYC/KYB journey calls for an intelligent risk platform that offers ongoing due diligence. One such automated platform is WorkStation from NorthRow.
WorkStation offers an agile application that provides real-time alerts for KYC/KYB onboarding and ongoing monitoring. It is based on specific rule decisioning, that is tailored to make it relevant to individual businesses.
Regulated businesses that have a general lack of visibility for intelligent risk management are unknowingly negatively impacting their business. Ignorance of these matters leads to companies taking unexpected hits when issues occur beyond the first tier of onboarding.
Unique compliance risks
Different industries face unique compliance risks, based on the complexities of their products or services. This is also coupled with their individual risk appetite. Risk professionals must understand the potential threats their industry faces and have risk mitigation plans in place.
The risk intelligence solution, WorkStation, is powered by machine learning and AI. It helps businesses make better decisions in real-time by quantifying and prioritising the risks that need to be managed.
6 rewards of intelligent compliance and risk management
Read more to find 6 rewards of using WorkStation to intelligently manage your compliance risk:
1. Improved costs
A primary benefit of risk management is acquiring knowledge of the risks, where the risks are, and how substantial they are. By knowing all that, the compliance team can focus their resources on high-risk areas. This will make them more efficient and reduce the need for human intervention.
Good risk management practices can help detect bad actors early in the onboarding process, reducing the risk of exposure.
Automating processes, through the introduction of a bespoke software platform, enables compliance teams to work more efficiently. By letting the software take the strain of automating manual, time consuming and mundane tasks. Reducing the need for human intervention in mundane activities also reduces the level of errors made throughout the process. This also eliminates the need for time-consuming and costly investigations and interventions.
2. Faster decision making
In today’s business world, customers are no longer prepared to wait for companies to make long-winded decisions on their applications. Manual, or partially automated processes, can take days to verify a fairly simple query, and that delay can cost you lucrative business.
By introducing an automated software platform, such as WorkStation with its powerful single-API structure, decisions can be made much quicker. WorkStation’s single-API interrogates multiple national and international databases in seconds, enabling you to make decisions almost instantly. This can put your business at the forefront of technological expertise, ahead of your competitors, whilst providing peace of mind, as well as a verifiable audit trail.
3. Reduced risk of fines
Compliance risk management is the process of assessing and identifying regulatory compliance threats and risks to your business. Each risk can pose a threat of legal penalties and financial losses. With real-time, automated alerts from WorkStation, your business can identify and quantify the level of risk to reduce your exposure to and minimise the impact of such fines.
Reducing exposure in this way, allows your business to focus on growth whilst avoiding financial penalties, which is far more advantageous than doing nothing.
4. Stronger brand reputation
Failure to deliver compliance means a risk of losing your reputation. The challenge of deriving a positive reputation from compliance is that people tend to learn about a company’s compliance habits when there is bad news.
Failing to comply with compliance regulations does not just affect the reputation of a business. It can lead to loss of market share and detrimentally affect profits. It also personally affects those in charge of the business.
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) now holds individuals in senior positions personally accountable for any compliance breach as well as the culture within their firm. Failure to meet responsibilities can lead to individuals facing heavy fines, as well as prison terms, whilst ignorance of the wrongdoing is no longer a mitigating factor.
Using WorkStation allows your firm to mitigate those risks, to both the business and individuals, whilst maintaining your brand reputation and protecting your clients.
5. Ability to innovate
A failure to innovate in the business world can leave you limping behind competitors who are soaring ahead because they decided to update their systems and processes. Imagine being hampered by manual processes to onboard your digital customers, often taking days, or longer, to make decisions, whilst your competitors can offer same-day decision-making?
In this environment, where your onboarding team is constantly playing catch-up, which itself can lead to costly human error, there is no time to sit back and take stock of your systems and processes, to see what could be done better.
To remain competitive, all companies need to innovate. Systems and processes are constantly going out of date, in today’s fast-moving technological environment. If you don’t innovate, you stagnate, and stagnation leads to loss of impetus and loss of business. It’s a downward spiral that can lead to ruin, if not checked.
Automated onboarding systems give you an edge and they also give you time to innovate, to take stock of what you are doing and to find ways of making it better. That way lies a competitive edge.
6. Stay ahead of the competition
Introducing an automated software platform for your onboarding, gives you more than a competitive edge. It also enables you to gain advantage over your competitors if you have the capability to deliver truly innovative processes or products.
There are probably many different aspects to your business, most of which you will have in common with your competitors. So, being able to develop innovative solutions to one or more of these aspects, can put you one step ahead of the competition. That advantage may only be short-lived, but if you have planned to take advantage of it, it can be very beneficial.
The benefits you can derive from a commercial advantage may only be short-lived, but continuous development and innovation will give you incremental stepping-stones of advantage. These can give your business a regular and useful boost that can sustain your business in what is a very competitive market environment. A few peaks of increased business and profit can make all the difference to your bottom line, come the end of the financial year.
Being known and recognised as an innovator will also enhance your reputation within the industry, both with your peers and with customers. Having an automated software platform for your onboarding, can free-up the developmental thinkers within your team, to identify new ideas and processes that will ultimately help to drive your business forward.
