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| Benefits & Compensation |
Assessment, Solutions & Optimization |
Governance, Risk Management & Compliance Services |
Industry Experience |
BC Strategic Partners |
| Governance, Risk Management & Compliances Services |
| Compliance is a topic that few companies can ignore. Organizations around the world are faced with an increasing number of governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) challenges. While compliance is commonly associated with financial reporting regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Japan’s Financial Instruments and Exchange Law (known as J-SOX), Basel II, or the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), the compliance environment is complicated by a raft of other requirements, including industry regulations, product quality standards, risk management requirements, government records mandates, and security policies. Failure to meet compliance requirements can lead not only to financial penalties but also to loss of license to trade, ongoing scrutiny, criminal prosecution, adverse publicity, loss of reputation, and more. When you factor in both the difficulty of achieving and maintaining compliance and the consequences of non-compliance, it is no wonder that GRC strategies have become a top priority within enterprises today. In fact, AMR Research estimates that total spending on GRC in 2007 will reach U.S. $29.9 billion, an increase of 8.5 percent from last year1. Despite this, many our customers struggle to understand how to respond holistically to the regulatory requirements that affect them. Efforts to meet GRC challenges have left many companies with a disjointed collection of specialized applications and processes, some of which are expensive to maintain and hard to use. Furthermore, these narrow solutions face limitations because they cannot scale to address new or changing requirements and do not integrate well with existing infrastructure. |
| For a compliance program to be successful, it should address people, process, and technology. People need to be properly trained and committed to leading compliance planning and execution. Processes need to map to regulations, frameworks, and internal business objectives. The supporting technology needs to be designed to enable people to adhere to processes more efficiently. While technology alone cannot solve compliance issues, it can certainly streamline and facilitate the processes behind them. The challenge is that the technology must be easy to use to ensure that it actually gets adopted. It must be able to work with existing systems, including different compliance-related technologies already in place, and it must be flexible enough to be configurable to a variety of different GRC scenarios, including changes to new and existing regulations. |
| A well-designed GRC system does more than just support compliance. It can help you deliver measurable results and gain a competitive advantage through more efficient business processes, better product and service quality, a more secure information environment, better visibility into operations, increased trust and improved reputation with customers and suppliers, and better preparation (and reduced costs) for records retrieval, legal discovery, and audits. EFS professionals have their roots in compliance having been responsible for all compliance issues in a national full service securities brokerage operation prior to founding EFS. Whether the need was for proprietary software development, document retention or developing internal controls for audit reliance, we have been there and done that from project inception to completion. Now partnered with Microsoft, the firm can offer a full range of consulting and implementation services based on practical experience and strategic alliances. |
| 1. John Hagerty and Eric Klein, “Compliance Is Still a Priority: Total GRC Spending Approaches $305 in 2007 and Growing,” AMR Research, February 2007 |
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