The Critical Role of Risk and Compliance Reporting Automation

Knowledge is power and harnessing the power requires having the information at the right time and in the right place. The insights and analytics that businesses need to succeed in managing risk and compliance are already present within the data and information they already have, but it is often inaccessible. Modern risk and compliance technology is dedicated to ensuring that this inaccessibility is removed.

Modern consumers expect faster and better services from banks. Improving the speed of service delivery is only possible if the necessary risk and compliance processes necessitated by each financial transaction or action are also sped up and made more efficient. Reporting automation has thus slowly become a critical piece of any successful risk and compliance management framework in the financial sector. Automated reporting is not just a tool that can be deployed within the existing risk and compliance framework; it requires redesigning the entire framework to make data accessible.

Why Businesses Struggle with Reports

When risk and compliance are managed manually via document and spreadsheet software, the data required for reporting is spread across multiple documents, spreadsheets, email threads, and other channels of communication and information storage. If a member of the risk or compliance team is asked to create a report, they must first gather all the data required for the report.

Collecting data is a difficult task in and of itself. The member of the risk or compliance team must first locate all the data. Certain pieces of information may be contained in documents or spreadsheets maintained by employees from various departments. The member of the risk/compliance team must then request the necessary information. This is only the beginning of the process of preparing data for use in the report. After the data has been gathered, it must be standardized.

Different departments within an organization may have their own data standards and formats, which means that all data must be standardized for comparison and analysis.

Once all data is collected, it is analyzed and processed, and finally, the report is written based on the insights gained from the data. The risk/compliance team member may compare the data to previous quarter’s results, to data from peer banks, or to any other metric in order to derive meaningful insights. This complicated process is not conductive for insightful reports and analytics.

Automation Redefines Reporting

Modern risk and compliance management solutions fundamentally alter how data is handled in organizations which allows them to enable reporting automation. All risk and compliance data are either manually entered or captured automatically by the platform. Because the platform is storing the data, it is standardized at the time of storage, rather than having to be standardized by a member of the risk or compliance team.

Reporting risk and compliance automation has slowly become a critical piece of any successful risk and compliance management framework in the financial sector. Click To Tweet

This is how contemporary risk and compliance solutions can automate reporting across the organization – the solution has already taken care of the difficult part of the process, collecting and preparing the data. When a user clicks a button to generate the report, the solution simply retrieves the data from the database and inserts it into a report template.

Real-Time Reports and Dashboards

Since modern solutions capture data from events in real time, management can access reports as needed. Rather than relying on employees to generate reports, managers now have instant access to the most up-to-date metrics related to risk and compliance activities. This means that whenever an executive level member of the organization needs business intelligence to make a decision, they make it using current data rather than out-of-date metrics.

The metrics are not restricted to periodic reports either. Since all the data is being captured in real-time, it can be showed on executive dashboards. Instead of having to go and look for the information that they need, risk and compliance managers are provided a snapshot of the overall risk and compliance framework on a dashboard. This ensures that important data and notifications are not missed or ignored.

This results in a paradigm shift in risk and compliance reporting. Instead of a periodic activity that provided insights based on old data, the reporting is in real-time and always available when needed. Instead of requiring a lot of labor hours to be compiled, the reports can be generated quickly through smarter workflows and better data utilization.

Reporting automation is a critical part of any successful risk and compliance management frameworks. It is identified as one of the three must-have technologies businesses need to succeed in 2021 and beyond. For more details on how reporting automation increases operational efficiency and business intelligence and a discussion on the other two critical parts of a risk and compliance framework download our complimentary whitepaper: Reducing Effort & Increasing Visibility in Compliance: 3 Must-Have Technology Capabilities.