In the current challenging economic environment, many institutions will be reviewing their spending and will try to make sure that every cent is being invested wisely. Meanwhile, history tells us that in times like these criminal activity typically goes up, meaning the need for resilient and effective programs to mitigate financial crime exposure is ever more critical.
We can expect the regulatory landscape to continue to become more onerous on firms and so it is easy to imagine a situation where the board wants to drive down costs across the business, criminals are looking for easy ways to clean their dirty money and regulators are busier than ever.
Sounds like a perfect storm for banks and other regulated entities.
One area that many institutions are looking to for efficiency savings is their Business Wide Risk Assessment (BWRA). They are examining how to transform an annual laborious, manual, cross-divisional strategic exercise without clear links to the institutions’ daily operations, into a dynamic, relevant, evidence-led risk assessment that has clear onward actions and feedback loops. In other words, they aim to use the BWRA to quantify the impact that compliance teams, controls and actions have. This allows them to defend the critical importance of the financial crime compliance department in times where pressure will be applied to reduce costs.
It is not unusual that management might ask themselves what value anti-financial crime compliance processes are bringing to the business. Which is why, at Acuminor we have thought hard about how we can support businesses making difficult decisions in a tough economic environment. In particular when it comes to the compliance team, who sadly are still sometimes viewed as a cost center and the true value and impact of compliance on the bottom line isn't always clear.
Here are 5 things you can expect from an investment in Acuminor's Risk Assessment Professional:
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Reduce time spent identifying risk and increase time spent mitigating it – Acuminor has already identified your relevant risks and threats based on the largest financial crime risk and threat database in the world. We have done this, so that you will have more time to spend on mitigation. This significantly reduces the time spent, and frustrations associated with extensively and often poorly completed inherent risk questionnaires.
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Use the BWRA to increase the efficiency in your KYC/CDD and Transaction Monitoring processes – Our Risk Assessment Pro solution enables you to map out all your risks to your current KYC/CDD and Transaction Monitoring controls which enables you to find over as well as under mitigated risks and quickly understand where you can increase the efficiency of your control environment.
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Low effort implementation – no need for complex tech or IT implementation. On-boarding will be integrated into your normal BWRA-cycle. You transition your approach while at the same time completing your BWRA - work you'd have to be doing anyway.
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Low effort maintenance and self-service – as a user you can change the methodology or add content to the tool without assistance from Acuminor or any other external party. Our platforms are built in a way that allows you to flex and adapt our 'out of the box' approach easily for all your normal use-cases . We train you to become experts in our platform and our methodology is fully transparent, so, none of those dreaded 'black boxes' that make regulators uncomfortable and no need to engage expensive third party services. You are in control.
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No need to start from scratch every year – Acuminor’s platform enables you to re-use all your work done in previous iterations of your BWRA in perpetuity. So, instead of being a yearly one-off exercise it can become an ongoing iterative process that gives you up-to-date information, enabling you to focus only on what has changed in your business and in the threat landscape.
By using Risk Assessment Professional you will, potentially for the first time, be able to quantify the investment in your anti-financial crime controls by clearly demonstrating how effectively those controls address your real world threats. You can make decisions about where you spend your limited (perhaps diminishing) budget and utilise precious resources in the areas that address the most pressing threats. You can quickly re-distribute areas of over-control or over-spend and crucially you can defend your spend to the board by demonstrating the impact on real world or high priority threats.
An investment in Risk Assessment Professional translates to an investment that will benefit the entire anti-financial crime program, talk to us and ask for a demo to see how you can do more with less, whilst improving outcomes in fighting financial crime.
