Enhancing Risk Management with Navigator, by Nexus Assurance

Introduction

Financial services firms face a wide variety of operational risk exposures, including cyber, information security, regulatory, and outsourcing risks, and the impact of an event can be devastating. Firms that effectively identify, evaluate, and mitigate operational risk exposures can achieve operational resilience, staying agile, minimising the impact of risk events, and protecting brand and shareholder value in the long term. This case study explores how the implementation of Navigator, by Nexus Assurance, a digital control and governance platform, can significantly benefit regulated financial services firms by delivering a centralised solution to enhance and standardise risk management, governance, and control processes across their teams.

Challenge

In today’s complex regulatory environment, financial service firms face challenges associated with manual risk management processes, disparate risk registers, and the increasing complexity of regulatory and compliance requirements. Traditional approaches to compliance and risk management are often time-consuming, error-prone, and lack real-time insights. Risk Managers and Compliance Officers can struggle to keep up with evolving regulations, leading to potential lapses and increased risk exposure.

Solution

Navigator, by Nexus Assurance, is a comprehensive digital control and governance platform designed to deliver efficient protection to regulated entities. Navigator’s risk hub allows firms to tailor and streamline their risk management and control processes in response to growing compliance demands and the need for robust risk management practices. Using Navigator, a firm can convert its risk registers at both group and local levels from Microsoft Excel into the platform’s digital risk register format, where they can be fully integrated with real-time links to mitigating controls or tasks. Additionally, mitigating control processes can be converted from a Microsoft Word or Excel evidence framework into the platform’s digital activity workflow format. Nexus Assurance provide the support needed for the conversion of risk registers and upload of control activity templates, which can be efficiently completed by a firm’s operational team and do not require technical resources.

Benefits

Navigator’s risk solution can empower a firm to:

Gain Risk Intelligence: Achieve a comprehensive view of compliance and risk status across the firm, allowing prompt prioritisation and addressing of potential issues.

Centralise Management: Centralise risk management activities, documentation, and reporting on one secure platform to eliminate silos, strengthen governance practices, and reduce the risk of oversight.

Standardise Processes: Create uniform and streamlined procedures across all offices to reduce manual effort, ensure consistency, and ensure adherence to regulations and industry best practice.

Enable Dynamic Updates: Easily update control checklists to reflect the latest regulatory changes, ensuring timely adaption to new requirements and ongoing compliance.

Provide Audit Trails and Transparency: Maintain a complete, time-stamped record of all activities, ensuring transparency and accountability while simplifying the audit process. This capability facilitates regulatory inspections by providing regulators with timely access to relevant data and documentation.

Results

The adoption of Navigator’s risk solution has the potential to revolutionise a firm’s risk management framework. By delivering full visibility of all risks, the firm gains a strategic advantage in proactively monitoring and managing its evolving risk status, as well as assessing the effectiveness of mitigating control activities, which will be standardised within the platform. Consequently, the occurrence of compliance-related errors and the risk of associated regulatory fines should diminish. By automating routine control processes and workflows within the platform, the firm not only saves time but also becomes more adept at swiftly adapting to regulatory changes. This automation alleviates the burden of manual updates, enabling risk and compliance officers to redirect their focus toward strategic initiatives. Additionally, the implementation of digital checklists on the controls side ensures a robust evidence trail, resulting in a substantial reduction in the time spent on compliance audits.

Conclusion

By leveraging Navigator firms will achieve significant improvements in regulatory compliance, risk management, operational efficiency, and resilience. The platform’s advanced features enable firms to adapt to evolving regulatory requirements, mitigate risks effectively, and maintain a competitive edge in the financial services industry. This case study highlights the transformative impact of technology in driving compliance and risk management excellence within regulated firms.