Compliance Week, January 15, 2021 —
Embracing technology to help manage risk, reduce administrative burdens, and improve efficiencies is a strategy that’s been developing in the compliance space for a while, but the coronavirus pandemic has fast-tracked the urgency behind it. A pair of recent reports explores this trend in more detail, as well as the compliance risks and opportunities created as a result.
Riskonnect CEO Jim Wetekamp offers some other reasons for why compliance historically has not been involved in these decisions. “It may be that the risk of not involving risk and compliance isn’t really understood,” he says. Sometimes there’s also the concern that involving risk and compliance and other business functions will slow the process down.
The danger in taking a siloed approach, however, is that a given risk—a cyberattack, for example—can infiltrate the business from anywhere, Wetekamp adds. The only way organizations can adequately protect themselves is for risk culture and awareness to come from the enterprise level, where everyone takes ownership of that risk and feels that it’s one of their key objectives, he says.
