Introduction to the Risk Assessment Platform

The importance of effective risk management

Regulators around the world expect regulated businesses to have sound risk management practices that allow them to identify, assess, mitigate and manage risk exposures around a wide-range of risk domains, such as conduct risk (Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Bribery, Market Manipulation); operational risk, credit risk, market risk and so on.

Increasingly, the regulatory environment is becoming more hostile to regulated businesses that fail to manage risks effectively. With fines exceeding billions of dollars and the introduction of executive accountability regimes it is more important than ever to develop effective risk management practices.

All to often, financial institutions and others responsible for managing significant risk exposures are relying on primitive excel spreadsheets that are unreliable, prone to error and simply not fit for purpose for effective risk management.

Why did we build the risk assessment platform?

The Risk Assessment Platform has been purposefully designed with several goals in mind:

• Provide organisations with the tools to help them build capacity and capability in risk management
• Provide a highly flexible platform that can be configured to suit the specific risk management frameworks of established businesses across any risk domain
• Provide organisations of different sizes, sectors and geographies with a market-leading solution at an affordable price
• Provide risk domain expertise in a platform that can be used straight-away without the need for expensive consultants

Key Content

Company administrators can purchase content maintained by Arctic Intelligence (i.e. global content) or customise their own content (company content).

The key content in the platform includes:

• Domains - the risk topic area, e.g. Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Bribery & Corruption Risk, Fraud etc.
• Risk methodology -  the risk rating scale and control effectiveness rating scale (used in overall risk calculations)
• Country risk model - risk ratings of countries (this is for information only)
• Control library
• Supporting documents templates – create a checklist of documents required for the assessment process
• Risk models with answer sets - the framework/categorisation of risks that will be assessed
• Assessment and sub-assessment - brings all the content together and allows users to work through the risk assessment and capture results
• Report - output of the assessment for review/sign off by the board or senior management.