Use your governance, risk, and compliance program to drive value

Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs are often viewed as expensive risk initiatives intended to satisfy management and regulatory risk management requirements. The time to change that perception is now.

Today’s rapidly evolving global business landscape makes it impossible for organizations to manage risks the way they have in the past, leading GRC to transform into a business value imperative beyond traditional risk management. By shifting focus and using innovative solutions to turn data into strategic insights, organizations can use their GRC systems to drive broader risk value and operational efficiency.

Moving toward value creation
With the modernization and integration of core GRC technology on a significant upswing, GRC functions are evolving toward a single risk language that brings together the first, second, and third lines of defence and speaks to more than traditional risk and compliance functions, including business operations, IT, and ultimately, the customer. The emergence of automated testing capabilities around robotic process automation (RPA), cognitive intelligence, continuous monitoring, and advanced analytics is transforming GRC technology into a tool that allows for real-time risk assessment, awareness, and reporting for risk functions and business operations.

For instance, with the incorporation of AI into GRC platforms, an automated bot can sift through data and systems to identify risk-related patterns based on established rules and execute routine testing processes in less than an hour—something that would take a human much longer to complete. Automated systems can also potentially find gaps people might miss, they can work around the clock, increase overall quality in execution, and extrapolate trends—ultimately automating testing and workflow into an organization’s GRC platform and stakeholder base, enabling faster and better informed decision-making.

Gauging the payoff
Given the functionality delivered by automation, robotics, and other emerging technologies, GRC functions that embrace modernization stand to realize a host of benefits. By vastly accelerating or entirely eliminating certain manual processes, companies can increase their efficiency and realize measurable cost savings while significantly enhancing the organizational value they get from their investments in technology.

Most critically, modern GRC functions gain the capacity to make better use of scarce resources and free up their teams to focus on areas of higher complexity, such as judgment-based risk monitoring, issue remediation, process improvement, and root cause analysis. Freed from reactive and manual activities, teams get the runway they need to capitalize on the upside of risk by identifying potential business opportunities hidden within unanticipated events.