Time and place; safe and secure: how legacy tools have amplified problems associated with remote working

Written by

Simon Shepherd

Published on

Insights

MYRIAD Group Technologies Ltd - Revolutionise your Third‑Party Management
Timing, in life, is everything: the challenges posed by lockdown under COVID-19 have led to a step-up in the number of inbound enquiries we have received since the start of the pandemic. Deals we have concluded during the summer were initiated long before the crisis began and have been driven by sound business cases, forward planning and a willingness and desire to execute on projects that have efficiency and cost savings at their heart.
During the crisis, many large Financial Institutions have, however, been forced to re-examine the levels of resilience offered by legacy tools. The risks run from the lack of security and availability when working remotely have – on occasions – been laid bare and are certainly, now, much better understood. The two are indivisible and swapping manual updates to spreadsheets which are circulated on email is not how this should work.
Vendor and Network Management teams sit at the heart of the Risk and Compliance function. There is a whole ‘GRC’ Industry that was born out of the ‘GFC’ that continues to thrive and grow, but it is based on one thing alone: good, clean, properly organised data. The drive to improve the efficiency of internal and regulatory compliance, while also strengthening risk management and business resilience is vested in that data, no matter how raw it is deemed to be; how that data is stored and made available remotely and securely, also needs to be part of the solution.
It is clear that disparate and sub-optimal legacy systems have proved a distinct drag on performance when working remotely. This has driven one of the key changes we have seen in the last six months and that is a much more clearly identified need to consolidate data and to make that consolidated data available to users, immediately, and to downstream systems for onward processing. This extends the challenge from not just a security and an availability challenge, into an integration challenge too and this has been a refreshing and much welcome change and one which will only gather momentum in the coming months and years.
This slow but steady move away from siloed information can only underpin greater transparency and improved governance, the ‘G’ in GRC. MYRIAD’s management of relatively raw data, in a comprehensive and seamless manner, has proved of great benefit when this data is then fed into – sometimes much larger – dedicated Risk Management platforms. Consolidated views of core data, enabled by MYRIAD and Embus on the Client Onboarding side, support better reconciliation and improved integration, as well as the Risk Management function.
If, as we are being told, the pandemic is a sign of things to come in a much more ‘disrupted’ world, then being prepared sounds like the way to plan and proceed. Improved audit trails will reduce exposure to internal compliance and external regulatory actions and penalties. Visibility, accountability and a better understanding of risk achieved through this enhanced transparency are and will continue to be features of everyone’s lives as we go forwards.

Simon Shepherd
CEO, MYRIAD Group Technologies Limited
m +447799892667