Digital Risk

Turn Digital Risk to Digital Advantage

Are we fit for the digital age? How can we build confidence in ‘being digital’? To thrive in this new digital eco-system, you and your leaders need to be digitally fluent, confident to adapt to new and familiar digital risks. You need to be digital first. This is how you can turn Digital Risk to Digital Advantage.

Is your digital risk approach fit for the digital age?

Effective digital transformation requires more than just implementation of technology. By applying nine risk lenses explore the organisation–wide considerations that help to build digital confidence. What lens do you need?

Experiences and engagement

In our digital world news, good or bad, travels further and faster.

You need transform how you engage with your stakeholders - partners, customers, employees, and regulators – in support of digital transformation, to ensure you are delivering positive outcomes for all.

Questions to ask yourself

  • Is your adoption of digital technology excluding anyone?
  • Is your tech investment achieving measurable and positive outcomes for your stakeholders?

Ambitions and aspirations

To realise your strategic ambitions you need to be confident to make the right decisions and quickly.

The ability to articulate and quantify opportunities and threats in a digital world is challenging. Market forces fluctuate at pace and require an agile and connected approach.

Questions to ask yourself

  • Do you want to move faster, but feel held back by too much governance?
  • Can your ability to deliver digital transformation safely and securely keep pace with your ambitions?

Changing external environment

You need to meet customer demands. Keep the regulators happy. And stay ahead of the competition.

But the risks associated with digital transformation are leading to increased scrutiny that is often out of sync with the progression of innovation – making it difficult for you to align these priorities.

Questions to ask yourself

  • How quickly can you respond to rapid changes in the market, such as new entrants with different business models?
  • Do you have adequate oversight of your global regulatory exposure?
  • How close are you to your regulators?

Culture and leadership

In the digital era, success belongs to organisations that not only understand digital but also live and breathe it.

Your leaders need to be digitally fluent, and quick to adapt to new and familiar digital risks. They need to navigate digital evolution with confidence.

You need to inspire the right organisational mind-set to enable new ways of working and a culture that embraces digital to the core.

Questions to ask yourself

  • Is your board digitally savvy?
  • Is your organisational culture keeping pace with business change?
  • Does your business have a digital-first mindset at all levels?

Branding

A brand can be resilient for decades, but destroyed in minutes.

Your digital evolution, your brand and reputation have never been more important, as you use it to expand or recast your strategic ambitions.

Questions to ask yourself

  • What does your brand say about you and your digital aspirations?
  • How resilient is your brand in the face of a crisis?
  • What are your customers and employees saying about your business (including supply chain partners) online?

Organisation and workforce

Your digital success rests on building a workforce that is fit for the future.

Across your organisation you need to ingrain digital fluency, without compromising on security. You need a workforce that is agile, able to keep pace with the speed of digital change.

Your risk and controls teams have a new role to play in this digital world. They must be at the heart of the digital transformation agenda, equipped and empowered to drive organisational value.

Questions to ask yourself

  • Are your Risk and Control teams holding you back?
  • Does your workforce understand the digital world, and their responsibilities?
  • Is your workforce agile, secure and resilient?

Enterprise operations

Investment in back-end enterprise operations, processes, and new technologies is essential to realise your strategic goals.

But, your risk management must keep pace with a more dynamic and automated operation, and more often than not, this is an after-thought.

Questions to ask yourself

  • Is risk management embedded from the start of digital transformation?
  • Have you struck the right balance between after event assurance, and before the event monitoring?

Platform, data and infrastructure

The systems, technology and data that digitally represent your prospects, customers, partners, and suppliers is changing rapidly.

But as you digitally evolve your legacy infrastructure can hold you back.

Questions to ask yourself

  • How do you monitor your technical control debt?
  • Is enough spent on securing new technology?
  • Are you confident about where your data is and who is accessing it?

New digital ecosystems, business and service models

New business and service models use partners and suppliers in different ways.

Rapid mobilisation can blur lines of visibility across the different parts of your business, creating a new digital eco-system and an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Questions to ask yourself

  • Do you know who you are doing business with?
  • How quickly can controls be reported on across your supply chain?
  • How many of your suppliers use cloud to host your systems?
  • Do you know who has your customer data right now?

Where to focus first

Regulation and culture in the digital world

Controlling disruptive technologies

Digitisation of risk, compliance and control management

Safe and ethical implementation of AI and Machine Learning

Digital transformation with confidence

Regulation and culture in the digital world

Digitalisation brings unprecedented opportunities to enhance consumer experiences, develop new digital sales channels, and realign business activities around the customer journey.

But the closer your business is to your customers, the more pressure there is to get things right first time – bad news and experiences travel fast on social media.

  • How do you embed appropriate controls into digital customer journeys without compromising user experience?
  • How can you use your data more effectively to manage compliance for digital channels?
  • What are the conduct and customer risks that arise from your digital customer journeys?

Controlling disruptive technologies

The pressure to innovate at speed and keep pace with competition has never been more critical as digital technologies continuously evolve.

Those that adopt these technologies effectively ensure that they understand the risks that these technologies present, the opportunities for effective control that they provide, and tailor their governance models to reflect the level of risk associated with the technology as it scales and matures.

  • Is your business need for speed to market creating unnecessary risk for to your organisation?
  • Do you have a flexible control model to encourage innovation without exposing yourself to too much risk?

Digitisation of risk, compliance and control management

Digitisation presents unprecedented opportunity to elevate the role of risk, compliance and control teams by turning the vast and growing streams of data into actionable insights.

In order to take full advantage of digitalisation and to ensure risk, compliance and control activities are not left behind, new operating models, systems and processes need to be developed and embedded

  • Are you able to monitor risk in real time?
  • Are your risk and control functions taking full advantage of disruptive technologies?

Safe and ethical implementation of AI and Machine Learning

The adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning is increasingly rapidly, with front and back office business functions scaling its use.

Safe and effective adoption is often held back by issues with early use-cases, as well as by internal stakeholder groups not being aligned on how to manage operational and technology risks, ethics and the use of data.

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  • Have you defined appropriate governance around AI and Machine Learning models?
  • Are your machine learning algorithms explainable and are sources of potential bias being managed?
  • Does your AI solution aligns with your organisational values?

Digital transformation with confidence

Being digital has the power to change course for your business future. But alongside the opportunities, the consequences of a poorly planned and executed digital transformation can be severe.

To transform confidently you must have the right people, partners, systems and governance in place, and embed an agile, flexible culture to drive rapid action when disruption occurs and incidents arise.

  • Have you got a clearly defined ‘risk appetite’ for digital transformation?
  • What could go wrong, and what you will do when it does?
  • Is your culture driving the right behaviours to keep your organisation safe?
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Charlotte Gribben

Lead Partner, Digital Risk

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“The pace of change and continuous evolution of digital technology, products and services means organisations are never ‘done’ with managing digital risks. We tackle digital risk with an ‘outside-in’ approach, starting with what ‘Being Digital’ means to a business, in doing so identify the blind spots or digital risk exposure they face.”

“The pace of change and continuous evolution of digital technology, products and services means organisations are never ‘done’ with managing digital risks. We tackle digital risk with an ‘outside-in’ approach, starting with what ‘Being Digital’ means to a business, in doing so identify the blind spots or digital risk exposure they face.”

Tom bigam

Tom Bigham

Lead Partner, Digital Risk

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“Thriving in a digital world requires a new understanding of digital risk and exposure. This is easy to say. But in reality many businesses are finding it harder to achieve… And getting it wrong can quickly create a social media storm and front page news.”

“Thriving in a digital world requires a new understanding of digital risk and exposure. This is easy to say. But in reality many businesses are finding it harder to achieve… And getting it wrong can quickly create a social media storm and front page news.”