About Maitland

Maitland is Europe’s leading financial, corporate, and political communications consultancy. Founded in Luxembourg in 1976, Maitland employs over 700 people in 13 offices across 12 countries with more than $165 billion in international assets under administration.

BACKGROUND AND REQUIREMENTS

Previously, Maitland was using a risk management system but had reverted back to using Excel spreadsheets as the solution wasn’t fit for purpose. Driven by the requirements to improve the ease of reporting and the need for workflows to manage risk data, Maitland decided it needed to invest in a new risk management system. During this time, Maitland also was experiencing a substantial period of growth, increasing the need for an automated system to alleviate the required administrative effort.

“The Riskonnect team has been very positive, helpful, and professional. We have never been pushed into anything, which is something that we experienced with some other vendors”.

CHALLENGES

The main challenges that Maitland experienced using spreadsheets to manage risk were:

Number one

Data corruption
If spreadsheets were shared across the organization the data frequently became corrupted.

Timeless data
Data became quickly out of date.

Difficult to track activities
It was not possible to effectively track corrective or mitigating actions, due to lack of defined workflows.

Incident management was also troublesome, as incidents were logged, but the data could not be interrogated as the detail was partly in Excel and partly in Word. Following up on corrective actions for each incident was convoluted and time consuming, which was heightened by business growth and an increase in the number of customers and projects. The risks related to those projects were not sufficiently visible as it was simply too big a function to manage on a spreadsheet.

“Price was also an important factor, as well as the web-form functionality that allows all Maitland users around the world to access the system and log an incident.”.

 Simon Illman, Risk Manager, Maitland

WHY RISKONNECT

Nicole Welz, head of internal audit at Maitland explained, “It was important to find a system that would be easy-to-use, easy-to implement, and preferably cloud-based. Following in-depth investigations and analysis, Riskonnect was clearly the best fit.”

Simon Illman, Maitland risk manager added, “Price was also an important factor, as well as the web-form functionality that allows all Maitland users around the world to access the system and log an incident. We were very impressed by the reporting and dashboards, plus the ease in which a report could be created. This was a major benefit for Maitland.”

Simon and Nicole were also impressed with the look and feel of Riskonnect, which they described as “intuitive,” “easy-to-use,” and “nice to work with,” which they were confident would help with the adoption of the system organization-wide.

BENEFITS

The key benefits that Maitland is experiencing with Riskonnect include:

Number one

The ease of reporting:
The ease in which data can be reported on and extracted for specific business units and countries has greatly assisted in the production of board and audit reports.

Improved efficiency through use of automated workflows:
Risk and incident actions can be more easily tracked and followed up with the help of automated workflows that have been set-up to meet Maitland’s specific requirements.

Reduced costs to the business:
Since the implementation of Riskonnect, Maitland has not incurred any IT infrastructure costs and has not needed to utilize internal IT support services.

Integration with the full Riskonnect GRC product suite:
Maitland can benefit from being able to the centrally manage all aspects of its GRC process using Riskonnect, with access to fully integrated risk, audit, and compliance management applications.

WORKING WITH RISKONNECT

Simon Illman explains, “The Riskonnect team has been very positive, helpful, and professional, and we have never been pushed into anything, which is something that we experienced with some other vendors.”