Many financial services organizations are struggling to manage their risk and compliance exposure in the face of ever-increasing challenges. Massive volumes of regulations are being developed across global financial market segments. The risks are varied, the data sources numerous and the relationships between entities are complex. It’s simply too much for traditional processes and infrastructure to handle effectively.
Vivek Bajaj, IBM Watson Financial Services Vice President, speaking at Think 2019
As financial services firms grapple with these mounting challenges, IBM Think 2019 has been a source of big ideas to solve these challenges. In particular, next generation governance, risk and compliance has been a key topic with sessions focused on how advanced technologies such as AI, advanced analytics and cloud deliver innovative financial services solutions.
Next-generation GRC solutions offer the potential to ensure compliance with evolving regulations through transformative business capabilities. They can help organizations coordinate their GRC-related activities across diverse business operations and multiple geographies while ensuring adherence to company policies. The best of these solutions seamlessly integrates domain-specific content and technologies with artificial intelligence and advanced analytics, thereby enhancing efficiency, profitability and competitive advantage. And they offer ease of use that encourages their adoption by those employees who are closest to the customer and involved in the daily operational business decisions that directly impact the organization’s vulnerability to risk—the organization’s “first line of defense.”
“How is IT risk different when IT services are outsourced? More stakeholders, more communication, more decision points, but no difference. You cannot outsource IT Risk.”
In a case study presentation titled, “Managing IT Risk with IBM OpenPages with Watson 8.0 in the Cloud”, Bob Shapiro, IBM senior Offering Manager, spoke to how the IBM Global Technology Services team deployed IT risk identification, management and monitoring on OpenPages 8 in the cloud. It was pointed out that the solution was deployed within days and has enabled ease of information collection, control testing and IT risk measurement through a new streamlined self-assessment solution. Quoting the project lead, Sergey Makogon, of the IBM GTS Regulatory and Risk management team: “It was very impressive to see things done in a matter of hours that usually require months of going back and forth.”
Watson was also center stage at Think and a breakout session titled “Watson at Work,” showcased an end-to-end cyber risk and regulatory compliance framework that is helping firms to keep pace with regulatory change and ensure appropriate controls are in place. The speakers – which included Heather Gentile and Christophe Delaure of IBM’s Offering Management, team as well as Kevin Hayes of Promontory Financial Group, demonstrated IBM’s Watson Regulatory Compliance ability, which is an AI assisted solution for understanding applicable changing to regulatory obligations and cyber risk management guidelines.
Regulatory change management is one of the most costly business functions, while resource-consuming challenges continue to face financial institutions. To successfully meet regulatory monitoring and reporting requirements, FIs often have to integrate content from thousands of regulatory publications each month. AI technologies offer FIs a range of diverse capabilities to meet this challenge. Some AI processes are particularly effective for specific regulations. For example, FIs find Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Robotic Process Automation especially useful in meeting compliance requirements—with NLP being the mostly widely used AI process by far.
In a city where technology reigns (and in February it rains), the staid governance, risk and compliance practice is being transformed at IBM Think 2019.