Overview

Something fundamentally important is happening. Organisations are on the brink of a new age of capabilities - the acceleration of digital technologies and the opportunity to rethink the approach to risk and assurance is radically changing organisations in ways that will challenge the basic assumptions and operating models of entire industries.

As a corporate leader, you will need connected, risk-intelligent immune systems that surpass traditional conformance approaches. If your organisation can CMD its approach to assurance, compliance and risk, it will be equipped to embrace digital technologies and new ways of working across the lines of defence. This will support you in achieving optimal performance, increased productivity, profitability growth, improved risk management, and a lower cost of compliance, all of which will drive towards World Class Risk Assurance.
 

Our key findings

• Virtually all respondents (97%) from our 11th Global Risk Management Survey reported employing the three lines of defence risk governance model, but said they face significant challenges
• 38% of respondents faced significant challenges in eliminating duplication across the three lines of defence
• World Class Risk Assurance generates higher-quality assurance at a lower cost, greater impact and value across the governance model, and provides actionable insights for the business as it:
  • aligns key activities across the lines of defence to reduce overlap, close gaps, and enhance control
  • provides transparency into process and control performance to help people identify, monitor, and mitigate risk events earlier and more effectively
  • automates activities to produce assurance in real time or close to real-time
  • initiates a time/value shift to move talent from manual activities to advising stakeholders and addressing threats and opportunities
  • provides businesses with risk-related responsibilities, data-driven insights and a digital workspace, which they embrace as they exercise higher levels of observation, analysis, and expertise.
     

Looking ahead

Digital technologies are revolutionising assurance, compliance and risk management, just as they are the business itself. These could free your people from repetitive tasks while equipping them with powerful tools and insights; and could enable broader, deeper, more forward-looking views of risks and ways to not only address, but also to exploit them.

Leaders who see the opportunities and harness these technologies—and reallocate their talent accordingly—are generating results far superior to those of legacy compliance and assurance methods and delivering on the promise of intelligent assurance. In addition to efficiency gains, productive collaboration and real-time insights, they are helping risk-related functions to keep pace with the larger organisation’s digitalisation initiatives. They are also helping those functions to position the organisation to better understand and address the risks of digitalisation.