Make banking security and compliance agile with TechRisk360

Banks face a confounding challenge: needing to adopt emerging technology quickly while ensuring security and compliance requirements are maintained at the highest standards. Security and compliance are major costs that account for at least 10% of bank spend—and possibly as high as 40%. The plethora of frameworks and rules that banks have employed to keep their systems secure, however, are clunky and convoluted to the point that product teams, architects, and engineers find workaround solutions to do their jobs.  

Solving the speed vs. security and compliance dilemma requires more than a brute-force approach. Organizations must shift their methodology completely—just throwing more personnel at the problem is not sustainable. West Monroe’s TechRisk360 solution helps organizations make that shift by changing the approach to how banks consider and organize around technology risk.  

Empower technology resources with the ability to balance risk and agility 

Controls are one of the key tools that banks leverage to maintain security and compliance. But too many and overly prescriptive controls can hamstring the evolution and innovation of technology—causing resources to worry more about checking a box than upholding the spirit of the controls. Our approach leverages a combination of guardrails and expert communities to help banks remain secure and compliant while also increasing agility.  

Risk in banking is significantly more elevated compared to industries such as retail and entertainment—institutions must consider current and potential risks for every action. We understand this and created our TechRisk360 solution with banking security and compliance-specific needs in mind. Here’s how it can help you:  

• Identify risks that aren’t visible 
• Create an operating model that proactively mitigates technology risk 
• Integrate emerging technologies with risk mitigation as a foundational component 

Our approach is designed to fit your needs—not the other way around. It’s adaptive and works from the information we gather from your organization. By leveraging your organization’s data, we help you approach risk management in three ways. 

Risk identification and solutioning 

Our first objective is to help identify risks within your technology products and/or applications. Our solution includes identifying what those risks are, how big they are, and where they are (e.g., root cause and flow through impacts). It’s also our goal to empower your team with the knowledge and tools to self-manage risk going forward. How do we accomplish this?  

• Detailed control maturity risk assessment. This assessment helps you uncover potential areas of weakness or immaturity and gain insights from heatmap reporting of risk findings.  
• Risk methodology training. We train your team on our methodology, equipping them to self-assess in the future and enhance the value gained from the initial engagement.  

Proactive risk management enabled by expert communities 

The second objective is to help you build the organizational foundation for proactive risk management. By reorganizing your operating model to support a guardrail approach, we can update and integrate technology while staying within the bounds of policy, security, and compliance requirements.  

• Assess your operating model. We assess your people, processes, and technology to design an operating model bespoke to your organization while leveraging previously designed models and industry best practices.  
• Pilot the new model. Even the best laid plans can fail. We test the bespoke model through a pilot program to ensure a successful initiative.  
• Establish an expert community. We ensure you have the right people and resources in place to provide expertise and guidance when using guardrails to add and update new technology.  

Digital strategy, design, and build 

What if you find yourself on the cusp of an integration or migration, needing to act? This third solution is designed to help you integrate, design, and build tech architecture in a secure and compliant manner.  

• Understand your digital landscape. We help you evaluate your organization’s digital maturity and how risks and controls impact your digital objectives.  
• Design and optimize your tech architecture. Leverage our financial services, technology, and security and compliance expertise to build your technology ecosystem — whether it be cloud-based or on-premises.  

Infuse your program with expertise that leads to agility 

Security and compliance are not optional. Speed is not optional. The key to moving quickly in the banking industry is leveraging guardrails and expert communities that help technology resources stay within the bounds of policies, frameworks, and regulations while providing perspective on your specific use case and application. West Monroe helps organizations build expert communities that fulfill their needs.  

These communities range from distributed networks to centralized, permanent teams. Within each team, you have principals who have deep expertise on a broad range of problems and initiatives as well as agents who bring general knowledge to each narrow domain. These models allow you to leverage expertise at scale, avoid penalties, and reduce disruption from remediation work.  

West Monroe wants to help you build a cohesive relationship between security and compliance and digital advancement. If you’re ready to employ a proactive approach to technology risk management, contact our team to learn more.