Company culture is regularly cited as one of the most important factors when candidates look for a new role, and it’s of equal importance when it comes to retaining talent. Part of this company culture involves elements such as work / life balance and how that impacts the individual, but it also includes areas such as compliance.
The last decade has seen a real explosion in the use of GRC solutions and IT GRC tools to help organisations manage their Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) programmes. There are a wide array of GRC software vendors to cater for a variety of requirements and the market overall is one that is experiencing a lot of growth.
There is now a much deeper understanding of what GRC is about and how IT GRC software can help realise the benefits of a GRC programme. GRC tools are used just as much by mid-market firms as they are much larger business, but all organisations use their GRC solutions in a different way.
GRC solutions and compliance software comes in many different guises. Some GRC tools are better suited to mid-sized firms for example, while others may be better deployed by specific vertical markets, such as Financial Services. Overall the use of compliance software has become much more widespread over the last decade, as organisations look to stay on top of the ever growing and increasingly complex regulatory compliance requirements.
The Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) market has made huge advances over the past decade or so. The three disparate elements of GRC have come together to make those functions more efficient and effective, and a major new market has emerged, supplying GRC tools and GRC solutions to organisations keen to reap the benefits of this more joined-up approach.
IT GRC software has been used particularly in the Financial Services (FS) sector. Increased compliance requirements, a post-financial crisis of 2008need to demonstrate that FS firms are well-governed, and a whole host of new business risk has created a perfect storm in FS for GRC software vendors.
We have only just passed the one-year anniversary of the European Union’s (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)and it would appear that regulators really mean business and are willing to punish organisations like never before.
UK airline British Airways (BA), one of the biggest airlines in the world, has been fined a record amount of £183 million (€203 million) after it suffered a cyberattack in September 2018. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has indicated that this is the biggest fine it has ever issued and the first to be made public following the advent of GDPR in 2018.
Defending an organisation against the sophistication and professionalism of modern cyber criminals is not an easy task. Never before have cyber criminals been so well organised and equipped, possessing hacking skills that many enterprises would pay top dollar for.
Such enterprises have begun investing in the right skills and tools to best defend their business against such hackers, but it remains a challenge. It therefore makes it much harder to take, when despite investment in technology and systems, employee error or oversight is then responsible for a data breach or other cyber attack.
Cyber security is a critical business issue. The volume, sophistication and severity of attacks over the past few years have highlighted just how tough a challenge it can be to defend an organisation against cyber attack.
The situation hasn’t always been helped by CEOs and other board members. In public they speak confidently about the need to keep their customers’ data secure, yet they do not always back up their words with the requisite action.
The second iteration of the EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) came into being on 3 January 2018, and it is fair to say that opinion has been divided, on both the motives behind its launch and also its success so far.
The initial objective of MiFID II was to strengthen investor protection and improve the functioning of financial markets by making them more efficient, resilient and transparent. This transparency into buyside and sellside trading activities across all the major asset classes in the capital markets industry was a major factor, but MiFID II hasn’t been universally welcomed.
For decades now, business has been very international. Companies – especially the bigger and mid-sized organisations – regularly trade in countries all over the world and many have of those companies will have a presence in a good number of those countries.
Business risk comes in many different guises in 2019. Strategic, reputational, compliance, financial, political….the list goes on and on. The breadth, depth and variety of risk in modern business makes the task of efficient, effective and smart risk management even harder for many organisations.
