Make Better Risk-Based Decisions
Enterprise Governance, Risk & Compliance software for Financial Services and other regulated firms.
Make Better Risk-Based Decisions
Enterprise Governance, Risk & Compliance software for Financial Services and other regulated firms.
The regulatory and compliance landscape has changed dramatically, and continues to change as does regulatory fines and other penalties. Taking a box-ticking approach, built around ad hoc spreadsheets or manual processes with disparate ways of working doesn’t meet regulatory or board demands; and does deliver business value.
Managing risk, specifically enterprise and operational risk has emerged as business critical over the last 10 years. The role of CRO has emerged as a critical member of any executive team.
The risk landscape continues to evolve with greater focus on risks such as Conduct Risk, Cyber Risk, Vendor or 3rd Party risk.
With increased business uncertainty, challenging economic circumstances, rapid technological change and rapid innovation, the ability to align operationally and execute strategy within clearly defined risk appetite boundaries is a critical management discipline and the key to delivering business value.
Key Challenges
Unprecedented level of business uncertainty, regulatory change and competitive pressures.
Key Challenges
Unprecedented level of business uncertainty, regulatory change and competitive pressures.
Frustrated that your people are spending too much time manipulating data with spreadsheet ‘systems’? Concerned they don’t have time to analysis the data to generate decision-making insights?
Too many spreadsheet restricting your team's ability to respond effectively to board and regulatory demands.
Good management reporting should deliver timely, accurate and concise decision-making insights. Sadly, for many firms the promise of good management reporting has yet to be delivered. Often reports are cobbled together using ad hoc spreadsheets or PowerPoint, often with poor data, little analysis and few, if any decision-making insights.
ICAAP & Pillar 2 disclosures are central to a firm’s regulatory obligations. CRO’s and the Board must ensure high quality and comprehensive disclosures to avoid further regulatory intervention and ensure the firm holds the right amount of capital.
Following the introduction of the Senior Managers & Certification Regime and the roll out of conduct rules by the PRA & FCA, firms have greater demands to clarify accountabilities and embed these into their GRC framework and company culture.
Many CRO’s have a clear vision about where they want to take their GRC framework and approach but they struggle to engage the senior team and find it difficult to generate support within the business. How to drive and sustain cultural change and embed the right culture and deliver significant value to the business without creating a cottage industry.
With the level of regulatory demands and change, and challenging low interest rate and competitive environment, Boards are demanding assurance that their firms are meeting their regulatory obligations, delivering their stated strategic objective and operating with clear risk appetite boundaries. Boards must be confident to pass these assurance to their regulators.
Products
To deliver high user adoption & high ROI, we built our tools on familiar office platforms; SharePoint, Office 365 & the Cloud.
Products
To deliver high user adoption & high ROI, we built our tools on familiar office platforms; SharePoint, Office 365 & the Cloud.
An Integrated Governance, Risk & Compliance software solution built on Microsoft SharePoint.
Our cloud service built on Microsoft Azure platform used to deliver cloud and hosted environments.
An Integrated Governance, Risk & Compliance software solution built on Office 365.
StratexStream is an external loss and GRC benchmarking datafeed based on anonymized customer data and external sources.
User-friendly, Monte Carlo simulation software solution for modelling operational risk & economic capital.
Testimonials
Our customers are talking about us. This is a sample of what they are saying.
Testimonials
Our customers are talking about us. This is a sample of what they are saying.
“StratexPoint is the right software solution for regulators looking to take a risk-based approach because its underlying approach [Risk-Based Performance Management] reflects how we need to regulate and how we want our regulated firms to manage their businesses”
“StratexPoint is one of the most innovative risk solutions in the market. Within its Appetite alignment matrix, it has changed the risk conversation I have with the business”
“StratexPoint was an important component is on move from Basic to standardized approach thus securing a 3% regulatory capital release and reducing our cost of capital significant”
“We worked with the executive to map out a 3 year risk management plan. StratexPoint enabled us to deliver this plan in under 9 months”
“Following the financial crisis, the regulatory environment has changed significantly, and continues to change. This puts significant pressure on small risk teams who should be focused on oversight and insight but all too often we find our days consumed dealing to large, cumbersome and inaccurate spreadsheets. By selecting StratexPoint we are putting in place the right tools to enable us to do our job properly and effectively”
“We were very impressed with the flexibility of reporting and outputs the system provides, its ability to provide a single, Enterprise-wide view of our Company Performance and Risks, the familiar and easy to use interface as well as the cost-effective pricing model”
“from a strategy execution and risk management perspective, StratexPoint is key to our success – it enables us to move fast. For a challenger bank in this market, the is critical.”
“By integrating enterprise performance management and enterprise risk management via risk appetite, StratexPoint leads the way from a regulatory risk perspective and reflects how we need to regulate and how we want our regulated firms to manage their businesses”
“As a relatively new business we recognise that we need to continually invest and develop and we believe that by employing the StratexSystems product, StratexPoint, we will be able to improve the quality of our risk management processes which in turn will support the rest of the business in achieving our long term objectives. This product will take us from a simple automation process to an integration of strategy and risk – both of which are essential to the success of any business.”
StratexSystems (now Ascendore) helped HML improve regulatory compliance at every step during the 12-month window to meet the targets set by the FSA. Our systems are more robust than ever before.
“As a business we are delighted to have the StratexPoint product supporting us as we grow. I strongly believe the cultural benefits and return on investment we will deliver from implementing this solution will be significant”
“As a well-established and diverse business that serves around 20m customers per week, providing different products and services spanning financial services; Government services; telephony; foreign currency; travel insurance and mail services and we believe that deploying the StratexSystems’ product, StratexPoint, will provide us with a robust Enterprise Risk Management and Governance platform to manage the diverse range of risks we encounter”
In the first year of our deployment of StratexPoint, we’ve considerably reduced the volume of frequently occurring operational loss events. It has improved our profitability.
Their vision of integrating business strategy, risk management and compliance is truly innovative. StratexPoint is uniquely positioned within the GRC space to enable this vision. And it is the only solution of its kind built on the SharePoint platform.
Services
Supporting the implementation & embedding of our software and related cultural change to deliver long-term business value.
Services
Supporting the implementation & embedding of our software and related cultural change to deliver long-term business value.
We provide a number of service roadmaps to support the implementation and embedding of our software tools.
We recognise to deliver real and lasting business value; process and cultural change must be delivered alongside software change.
We provide training related to our software tools and supporting methodologies and business processes.
Paraphrasing the original article that introduced the Strategy Map, in the presentation, Ascendore CEO outlines how the Strategy Map can be used as part of an overall strategy management system to improve the execution of the risk management strategy. This presentation is based on an Ascendore customers use of the Strategy Map for Operational Risk Management.
Our CEO, Andrew Smart is speaking at the New Generation Operational Risk: Risk Culture and Business Conduct Behaviour conference in Helsinki, Finland.
Andrew will be speaking on the topic of Embedding Risk & Controls Self Assessment (RCSA) into Strategic Planning and Business Strategy.
Business requirements for next generation enterprise GRC
Post credit crunch, firms have had to adapt to a more heavily regulated business environment with increased risk management and regulatory demands from boards and regulators, while also re-shaping the business model and attempting to deliver profits and growth. To fulfil these competing demands, firms need to take a different approach to GRC with a solution that meets the following criteria:
1. Support the shift from a centralised to a decentralised approach to Enterprise GRC
2. Enable a firm-wide risk transformation
3. Provide firm-wide clarity on individual accountabilities
Ascendore announces the immediate availability of StratexPoint on SharePoint 2016
Today, Ascendore is pleased to announce the release of the latest version, the 2016 edition, of its flagship Integrated Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) software solution, StratexPoint.
StratexPoint is the only integrated Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) software solution built on Microsoft’s SharePoint platform and the latest release; StratexPoint 2016 edition is built on Microsoft’s latest SharePoint platform, SharePoint 2016.
In moving to SharePoint 2016, Ascendore has significantly improved the underlying technology platform and architecture of StratexPoint and re-engineered the design and user experience of the solution with an emphasis on simplification and further ease of use.
Three reasons for embedding external operational loss and benchmarking data into your risk and compliance framework include;
“We have 285 risks and over 875 controls within our risk and controls framework...reporting anything sensible and meaningful on a monthly basis is a real struggle. Given the technology we use (spreadsheets and PowerPoint), the effort required to ‘hand crank’ the reporting pack production and the effort required to chase people across the business for data, the executive team receive the monthly report roughly six weeks after the end of the month. As the bank’s IT function, you would think we could do a lot better.”
Sound familiar?
“We are really happy with our management reporting. At the end of day 5 in the month, the executive team receives a monthly executive report with a personalised ‘slice’ of that report based on their accountability with the RACI. This personalised ‘slice’ of the executive report is more detailed than the main pack, highlights current and emerging issues to be discussed, and means everyone turns up to the monthly executive meeting well prepared and ready to go. The days where we spend half the meeting arguing about the numbers and reporting format are gone.
Does that sound familiar?
With the launch of the StratexStream Early Adopter Program (EAP), Ascendore is reaching out to Challenger Banks, Building Societies and Asset Managers and asking them to play an active role in the design of the new StratexStream External Loss & GRC Benchmarking service.
Here are three potential use cases for external loss and GRC benchmarking data.
With the launch of the StratexStream Early Adopter Program (EAP), Ascendore is reaching out to Challenger Banks, Building Societies and Asset Managers and asking them to play an active role in the design of the new StratexStream External Loss & GRC Benchmarking service.
Here are six potential data sets that could be captured within StratexStream and delivered to its customers.
This quote makes it clear that the way we develop and implement regulation has to change. How can it be sensible that we are 100 day out and there is still uncertainty about how to interpret the text of the (MiFID/MiFIR) regulation. Watch this space...we will change this!
"Wholesale banks are used to regulatory change and adept at dealing with uncertainty but there are just 100 days before the changes are to be implemented and the industry is left debating key interpretive issues in the text" - Julian Allen-Ellis, Director of MiFID/MiFIR at AFME
Last week, In Part 1 of this series, we outlined three key reasons why we built on Integrated Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) solution on SharePoint.
This week we add three more reasons for building our GRC solution on SharePoint. These are;