In the last 2 years my team was involved in automating risk management part for investment decision making, vendor accreditation, market risk, tender process, treasury management, credit risk and project management. That’s 8 different software packages selected from dozens of possible options. In this article I wanted to share some important takeaways from our risk management automation.
#1 Ask what the market can offer before listing your requirements
Time after time I discovered that software vendors often had interesting ideas and methodologies, something that we haven’t considered or something that was good enough to do the job even if it was a slight variation on our own approach. For example we were very glad to discover a vendor offering risk management automation for procurement that did a good job at capturing tax, compliance and performance risks. Or Archer Insight that has back tested monte-carlo engine built in that allows risk aggregation across the company in a way that is mathematically sound.
So my first advice would be to come with problems and make them as broad as possible, because you never know if someone in the market has a better way of solving the same problem than you can ever imagine. Couple of times, I literally used automation as an excuse to improve on the existing risk methodology. We did that for market risk, credit risk and investment decision making. Don’t waste this opportunity to upgrade your risk methodology, just automating what you did yesterday is just bad management.
In my experience RFP is an important contractual obligation between the vendor and the company, but I always made sure that I knew which solution we needed long before we started drafting the RFP. For me it was much more important to talk about specific use cases that we needed, read the methodology or review back testing results. Temporary trial access or at least video demonstrations allowed me to see and feel the functionality and be real about what expected tasks will be solved and which won’t be.
#2 Don’t chase the perfect at the cost of retaining risk
This point is huge. In 8 software implementations and 30+ vendors I found zero software packages that had absolutely everything we wanted. Let me rephrase that, out of the box never had every functionality we wanted but everyone was offering to develop tailor made solution for us, it would just take time and cost extra. That’s because every company is unique and your risk methodology probably has some nuances compared to the other 100 software implementations.
When thinking of automation we always separated core important functionality from the nice to haves. Every software decision in my experience was a trade off between selecting the software that automated most of the things important to us or to retain the risk exposure while looking for a perfect match. Keep in mind, that every day you credit or market or performance risk is not automated, monitored and mitigated, the company owns that risk exposure and can lose more money than the cost of software implementation. That’s why we first focused on automating the parts of risk management that had an immediate and direct savings.
For example implementing risk management into vendor accreditation protects the company from tax liability, credit risk and sanctions, that is a significant saving. Same with investment management, automating risk analysis part of investment decisions increases transparency, gives more comfort to the Board and allows management to identify and prevent significant risks. Another example is risk quantification for setting limits and automating reporting and monitoring of operational risks.
Automation saves money not just by saving man hours on data entry and report generating (that’s easy) but by reducing the risk exposure, reducing expected losses and reducing the required capital requirements.
Just keep in mind, it may be more cost effective to change own risk methodology instead of investing into software modification if both produce the same result.
#3 Back test the proposed methodology
As you can probably tell from the article I am big fan of risk management software that comes with its own methodology. And if the software vendor is offering a methodology I want to see the back tests. Because if the back tests are not available I will need to run them myself.
Which is exactly what we did for one of the biggest vendors in vendor accreditation in the country. Only to discover their out of the box methodology lead to disqualifying more than 70% of good vendors. Another surprise was the fact that out of 155 risk factors advertised only 30 made a significant difference to matter. This allowed us to update their risk model and continue to use the software effectively.
There were plenty of positive examples too, credit risk models showed great accuracy, performance risk models had their own back tests, Archer monte-carlo and risk aggregation engine is world class.
It is important when implementing the software with methodology to make sure the methodology is solid and you feel comfortable relying on it for decision making.
You can always ask me about automating your next risk management project. Happy to help.
Bio:
Experienced executive across strategic, investment and operational risks and insurance working within multibillion dollar corporations in Australia, GCC and Europe. Successfully implemented changes to quantitative risk analysis, risk-based decision making and neuroscience.
Saved more than $13 million per year in premiums on cargo and PD/BI insurance through industry leading quantitative risk analysis without changing deductibles or limits. Successfully presenting corporate risk profile at the Ministry of finance and helping secure more than $1B in extra funding.
Author of the most popular free risk management book in the world, more than 150K downloads in 3 languages. Risk manager of the year, FERMA, 2021, Honourable mention 2021, RIMS. Risk manager of the year, RUSRISK, 2014, Best ERM Implementation, RUSRISK, 2014, Best risk management training, RUSRISK, 2013, 2014, 2015, finalist in risk management awards in 2018 and 2019.
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