Coming soon - A new vision for unified risk management

In today’s era of exponential, interconnected risk, a unified view of relevant data that offers different lenses on the risks an organization faces is going to best serve their operations and business ambitions.

Andrew Bockelman, General Manager of Moody’s Data Solutions: “Our customers increasingly want to understand the continuum of risks that exist within and between their business relationships. At Moody’s, our customers have told us they want a truly integrated and holistic view of risks. To this end, we set out to bring software and data together in a meaningful way that helps businesses across all sectors better understand the dynamic and interconnected nature of business risks.”

Data is the key to unlocking all areas of risk assessment and management, as well as identifying opportunities for competitive advantage, efficiency, and expansion. Assembling trusted, verifiable data can enable companies to truly understand risk across their counterparty network in a way that is functionally agnostic, while also serving specific needs.

Whether related to regulatory compliance, financial health, risk in a supply chain, financial crime, or lines of credit, there is huge value and significance held within data to answer questions like: Who am I working with? Are they creditworthy? What hidden connections do they have?  Can we trust them?

When disparate datasets are brought together, they can help create an overall picture that tells a story which can be leveraged across an organization – not just in functions, but across functions. For example, data that indicates risky corporate behaviors, such as circular ownership and outlier directorships, that flag shell company-related risk can be of value to know your customer (KYC) teams performing their due diligence and also to teams analyzing financial health to make lending decisions.

Keith Berry, General Manager of Moody’s Compliance and Third-party Risk Management Solutions: "We are developing a unified risk platform, Moody's Maxsight™, which is coming soon. The platform will enable clients to assemble data into their own ecosystem, so they can better streamline analytics for more efficient and effective decision making. The culmination of our efforts will lead to an integrated data estate, with advanced analytics and ongoing development of automation across the spectrum of risk management to deliver insights about a third party."

Many organizations to date have been looking at risk and risk data in siloes - missing the opportunity to achieve unified records for greater transparency and to mitigate different areas of risk. The value truly integrated datasets bring to businesses, in all the ways this data can be applied, needs to be recognized.
 

Setting the scene for unified risk management

Consider a compliance function in an organization could be interested in sanctions data as part of onboarding a new customer, while over in another area of the business a procurement officer is also searching for sanctions information related to the same entity as a supplier. With a unified risk platform, each party has the potential to access the information they need and leverage it to make different decisions. This approach provides efficiency and economies of scale, and this is just one instance of how the strategy could work.

A holistic, interoperable approach can remove unnecessary duplication, cost, and maintenance by rationalizing systems and data providers that are redundant. It’s possible to streamline access to robust information in near real-time that can then be viewed for different purposes across the same business.

Danielle Ferry, MD and Head of Product Strategy and User Experience: “By consolidating around a portfolio-level view of risk, different parts of an organization can make decisions about different types of risk using the same tool and the same underlying data. This can help drive consistency and confidence in decisions and actions grounded in trusted data, while allowing for automated workflows to be dictated by the policies and processes of each individual business.”
 

Achieving the vision of shared risk intelligence to support data-driven decisions

Shared risk intelligence starts with unified risk management and is needed in an era when risks are ever-present, continually changing, and deeply connected. A unified approach could help organizations address the complex, global risk landscape and capitalize on opportunity.

Harnessing the power held in vast amounts of global data, organizations will be able to adopt a single platform to harmonize an overall picture of risk related to a third party, and view it in different ways to achieve transparency, make better decisions, and build greater resilience.

Through efficient use of data - integrated, streamlined and accessible via one software platform - businesses are positioned to make informed decisions that drive actions aligned with risk management strategies and organizational goals.