February is Time Management month. It’s only fitting, when you think about it. After setting those lofty resolutions for 2019 in January, wrangling control of your time is a crucial component of achieving your personal AND professional goals. One of the biggest potential time-savers for risk management professionals is technology. From initial risk assessment before on-boarding a new client to ongoing risk monitoring to surface threats more quickly, the power of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics show great promise.

Tools to help you identify and mitigate financial, regulatory & reputational risk

Know Your Customer (KYC)

Compliance risks are not just about fines and penalties. The public relations, market and shareholder ramifications can also be devastating.

Source: Corporate Compliance Insights

Moreover, the sheer challenge of staying current with an evolving array of regulations—particularly for companies with global operations—is enormous. Conducting risk assessments, due diligence and monitoring of 100s or even 1000s of third parties requires a huge commitment in both time and resources. And companies are still vulnerable to human error—from a simple typo to a major miss like not identifying an emerging risk BEFORE it becomes disruptive.

Let’s look at three ways technology can help you manage the time spent on risk mitigation.

Third-party risk assessment:Using technology to automate customer or vendor risk assessments or conduct ongoing batch screening streamlines your process so you quickly identify parties that require deeper due diligence before onboarding. Plus, you get the confidence of timely updates in the event that a customer or vendor becomes the subject of a sanction or is added to a watchlist. 

Source: McKinsey

Due diligence: Risk professionals cannot escape the need for conducting due diligence—particularly if a risk assessment determines the person or entity poses an elevated risk. But you can look for a due diligence research tool that leverages the power of AI to improve results relevance. Natural language processing and machine learning algorithms, for example, can be used to apply metadata to huge content collections so that search results are more focused—saving you time.  

Ongoing risk monitoring: Risk Monitoring is a full-time job—especially in today’s fast-paced digital world. The 24/7/365 news cycle, on top of a complex and always-evolving risk landscape, means companies need fast awareness into emerging threats. Technology is a huge time-saver in this area. Automated risk monitoring takes advantage of text analysis to identify key risk factors, entities named and more to separate the noise from the news and alert you to potential issues far sooner than a manual process. Plus, you can have more confidence in the results since this process scans thousands of documents in minutes, giving you a much broader perspective. How long would it take you to scan thousands of documents? 

Automation of risk mitigation offers additional benefits beyond time savings for risk management professionals. 

Source: Adaptive Insights 

So, as you’re looking for ways to optimize your daily schedule, see risk more clearly, and achieve your “better work-life balance” resolution, consider what tools you can add to your Risk Management process to make it more hands-off and more data-driven through automation.

3 Steps to Take Now:

1. Register for our upcoming webinar to learn how automated monitoring can save time while improving risk visibility.
2. Continue exploring the topic of risk mitigation on our blog.
3. Share this article with your colleagues and connections to keep the conversation going.