Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)

Adopting stronger internal control practices while improving business efficiency

What is GRC?

GRC is defined as "the integrated collection of capabilities that enable an organisation to achieve objectives reliably, address uncertainty and act with integrity". Now in existence for 15 years, GRC ensures that a business is run by risk appetite, internal policies and external regulations – using strategy, processes, technology and people. GRC is currently used in a wide variety of mid to large corporations as an integrated, holistic approach to organisation-wide governance, risk and compliance.

Risk Culture

Risk culture is perhaps a nebulous concept, but it is becoming more concrete in organisations that are properly focused on operational risk in today’s environment. What supervisors expect is a forward-looking, proactive approach to identifying and preventing risks – as well as a commitment to learning from actual risk events to promote increased resilience moving forward.

Culture cannot change overnight, but the organisations getting it right are setting the correct tone at the top (not just the CRO, but the CEO and board) – and are finding ways to educate business lines (the first line), as well as engendering a strong sense of risk ownership and the ability to change and fix things before they become a problem.

GRC: Facilitate the management of transversal risk

An increasingly common approach used by many financial institutions is specialist Governance, Risk Management & Compliance (GRC) technology, to facilitate the management of transversal risks.

This White Paper draws on collective knowledge of Avantage Reply’s risk and regulatory professionals, as well as industry experts – including financial nstitutions, software firms, and regulators – to address the following questions:

- What are the supervisory expectations on Internal Control?

- How can GRC help roll out an efficient Internal Control Framework?

- How does GRC create value?

- What should be the scope of implementation?

- What are the core implementation challenges?

- How should GRC evolve in the future?

Supervisory expectations and areas of focus

In the last decade, operational risk and internal control have both risen to the fore among global financial services regulators and supervisors. There is more concern about operational risk because risk is rapidly changing, broadening and becoming more sophisticated – and is also increasingly important to financial institutions. In this white paper, we will first outline how the foundational regulatory requirements and expectations developed over the years, before highlighting the focus of current concerns, alongside common practice in the industry.

Aligning GRC - across the organisation

The longer-term goal should be for the GRC technology to be aligned with the business model, to produce one single risk and compliance management approach and a reliable source of information.

Combining IT and Financial Services Expertise

Avantage Reply combines in depth subject matter expertise and profound knowledge of the Financial Service industry with technological know-how to understand and handle data to create value and to drive digital transformation processes.

This enables Avantage Reply not only to support insurances with the implementation of the optimal toolsets, but also to facilitate the business change process that needs to be initiated when introducing a new data governance strategy.

To learn more, download the full, free PDF and don’t hesitate to contact us for further questions: avantage@reply.com

Avantage

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Avantage Reply is a pan-European Financial Services (FS) management consulting firm, delivering change initiatives in Risk, Compliance, Finance and Operations. Avantage Reply has operations in Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Lisbon, London, Luxembourg, Milan, Munich, Paris, Rome and Turin. Our consultants advise on and deliver pragmatic solutions, supported by comprehensively tested analytical techniques using proprietary solutions, methodologies and prototypes. Being part of the Reply Group, Avantage Reply successfully leverages on the group’s technology competencies to deliver on client engagements. More details at