Financial Services Group seeks resilience in multiple acquisitions

Aug 18, 2021 6:52:35 PM

A global leader in financial services technology for the wealth management sector; this client operates across multiple countries and is the third-largest outsourced superannuation administrator in Australia.

The Global Chief Risk Officer was asked to implement a solution to improve management of risk across the group. Up to that point, the organisation had acquired several different companies. They used multiple different systems to different degrees of effectiveness, fairly inefficiently, all using their own systems and processes for managing risk and compliance.

The initiative originated at the board and executive levels, driven by a need for a unified system to manage risk and compliance requirements consistently. The goal was to enhance governance effectiveness—from streamlined reporting to comprehensive oversight of incidents, compliance obligations, and associated controls. The group sought a solution that could integrate risk assessments, log and track key data, and link these elements to support robust business continuity planning.

Due to the multiple systems at play, the welter of different processes resulted none of the data connecting to each other. At each round of BIA (Business Impact Analysis) it took about two months to collate all the necessary information and by then it was out of date. It also meant that to be able to understand and manage the risks and also report on them to the different forums, was pretty impossible.

ReadiNow the game-changer

There was a high reliance on manual processes and because of the volume, the number of incidents which were occurring was far too many. The challenge was how to get those down to a much more acceptable level. But identifying the trends and where the issues were occurring, without the data, was not possible.

ReadiNow delivered a robust risk management solution tailored to the client's managed fund administration operations. By consolidating incident management and risk assessments within a single platform, the business gained clearer visibility into key pain points and their root causes. This integration also enabled automation of controls, resulting in a significant reduction in incident frequency and a more efficient return on investment.

The Global Chief Risk Officer and his team found the ability to generate timely, data-driven reports highly valuable. This capability contributed to reducing the incident rate to just 0.02%, significantly enhancing the organization’s overall risk posture.

"So it enables the business to know where to prioritize any investments and improving the control environment.

– The Global Chief Risk Officer, a Financial Services Technology Group

Translating risk language into practical advice

A pain point the operations team faced was how to get risk management language, methodologies and thinking down to the operations staff. With Readinow they were able to detail and present what they were trying to achieve, and show how they were going against that goal. So it translated risk language into practical advice which was of great benefit to the organisation as a whole.

Operationally, it's critical that information collection and analysis across all components of the risk management framework are integrated and aligned. This ensures clear communication throughout the information chain—extending to business partners and senior management—so all stakeholders have a shared understanding of the data. ReadiNow empowered the operations team to deliver accurate, meaningful reports to senior leadership with greater efficiency.

“It very much helped with the workflow capability. Having that within ReadiNow, greatly assists in giving clear direction and information to help our operations staff fulfill the activities they need to fulfill. By either closing out instance, risks or assess controls.”

– Head of Risk, a Financial Services Technology Group

Flexibility to design

ReadiNow met all of the expected outcomes, delivering a fully integrated, single-platform solution. It enabled the organization to efficiently manage a broad range of risks and compliance obligations within one unified system.

“Group CEOs and business leaders are having more effective and holistic conversations about risk issues which has made that part of governance much more effective. Especially issues which straddle across multiple businesses.”

– The Global Chief Risk Officer, a Financial Services Technology Group

One of the greatest things ReadiNow impressed the Financial Services Technology Group's team with, is the flexibility to design the system for what they need. The Client is able to build features and functions and design forms and templates. They're also able to develop reports that address their specific business requirements. It’s the detail in the little things that has also been of great assistance. Such as customizing instructions on each field and tab to tell a staff member exactly what it means and what he/she needs to do. It cuts down internal training time significantly.

The Global Chief Risk Officer was also pleased that they don’t always have to go back to a vendor for configurations, because it's very much a self-serve system. They also didn’t need to get their own hardware because ReadiNow is a platform as a service(PaaS). It's providing the software out of the box accessible on a secure cloud-based solution.

“It was pretty good being able to configure it pretty effectively ourselves, which is a big advantage.”

– The Global Chief Risk Officer, a Financial Services Technology Group

“Our role in risk is to gather that information, and really understand what it means. How do you use it and how decisions need to be made from the information gathering exercise. So it's freed up capacity to be able to do what risk professionals should be doing.”

– Head of Risk, a Financial Services Technology Group

The Global Chief Risk Officer also added that the risk operations team have pretty tight timelines to get reports out for various business risk forums. ReadiNow has hugely impacted the team’s morale making that easier, more accurate, and possible.

Efficiency and best-quality reporting

ReadiNow proved to save a lot of time. In terms of efficiencies, being able to collate comprehensive and insightful reports for different risk forums. From the board level down through executives and business levels takes one person half a day. Whereas the set up before, would either take multiple weeks from multiple people and wouldn't be to the same quality standard. So they'd run out of time. So that's a big time saving and reporting improvement.

“In all of those forums, the feedback about the quality of the data and the timeliness of the information and the trends that are presented has been very positive. In my experience in a number of places, it's much better than anywhere else.”

– The Global Chief Risk Officer, a Financial Services Technology Group

With the ReadiNow platform, it's very easy for someone to lodge an incident. The system automatically distributes an email to all key stakeholders across the grid, depending on the workflows set, to make stakeholders aware.

“With incident management, it's vital that it is reported quickly and the right people know about it quickly, so you can get onto resolving it. Attempt to cut the incident in its tracks remedy the situation attempting to prevent the chances of it happening again. So ReadiNow been very effective at that, whereas the predecessor had no chance of doing any of that.”

– The Global Chief Risk Officer, a Financial Services Technology Group

The ReadiNow experience

In their experience with ReadiNow, the service hadn’t halted once the sale was made. The great attention and assistance really carries on.

“What we've found with ReadiNow compared to other products, is that it objectively had a very high rating across the 60 different requirements we called for. It had the best rating and scores across all of those requirements compared to all the others.

“Dealing with the team at ReadiNow has been terrific. They were knowledgeable, responsive and helpful. They were able to demonstrate to people from the business from a range of different disciplines in a manner that they are able to readily understand. They have been much more flexible, agile and responsive, and the support through implementation was terrific.

"From when we agreed to use ReadiNow, the implementation was done within a three-month period, which is pretty phenomenal."

–The Global Chief Risk Officer, a Financial Services Technology Group

The Financial Services Technology Group found ReadiNow to be very good at nurturing the business relationship, continually looking to improve the product. ReadiNow has been very open to feedback from customers, even bringing multiple customers together for forums, to share knowledge and insight which has been invaluable.

“So for all of those reasons, as a vendor and as a product, I found my experience is that it's superior. There's much more that we can do and want to do. So it's pretty exciting in terms of what can be done.”

– The Global Chief Risk Officer, a Financial Services Technology Group

Beyond SaaS – powerful networking

ReadiNow enabled the Financial Services Technology Group's team to connect with peers in other industries. Whether in retail, infrastructure, in power and gas or with mega banks. They came together to discuss how they're using ReadiNow to solve their risk compliance and governance plights. Sharing their innovation.

“I've had calls from people when they're going through a process to select any new risk system. I have recommended ReadiNow because it's a very good solution. It's a state-of-the-art solution. As a financial services technology company, technology risk is a very big proponent of our types of risks. ReadiNow is a really good solution for that.”

– The Global Chief Risk Officer, a Financial Services Technology Group

*This client has requested to remain anonymous at the time of publishing but is happy to have one-on-one discussions as a reference for ReadiNow's products. Please contact our team to facilitate.