SIFMA IAS Annual Conference 2015

Transforming the compliance function with groundbreaking decision support The regulatory environment for financial institutions has grown exponentially more complex over the past few years, constraining resources and budgets, and making it difficult to obtain consistent earnings growth. With limited visibility and a number of competing interests involved, it is difficult to set priorities in a way that ensures complete coverage of all compliance requirements. To offset competing priorities, organizations find compliance-related costs continuing to creep up, outweighing an organization’s cost-control measures and resulting in over-budget outcomes.

In order to address these situations, Grant Thornton LLP has invested heavily in value-added analytics solutions. We most recently developed our Resource Optimizer™ solution, which addresses this complex planning and scheduling environment. By mathematically optimizing the many variables that go into ensuring proper compliance coverage, and taking into account your key businesses constraints, Grant Thornton can identify significant resource savings that either drop to the bottom line or can be deployed elsewhere. As part of our solution, we are able to quantify trade-offs in the planning stage. The results are both quantitative and qualitative — quantifiable in terms of benefits generating in excess of a tenfold  ROI the first year, and providing qualitative evidence of meeting plan compliance and budget goals that can be communicated to all stakeholders with accuracy and confidence.

Take a look at our top three takeaways for transforming your compliance and internal audit functions by utilizing analytics.

1. Deep visibility into the business
   Both compliance and internal audit are functions that involve a set of nonlinear relationships and constraints. Understanding how to align those assets to maximize coverage or minimize cost requires a sophisticated analytics solution that can be used at the speed of your decision-making. The results are quantified so that the optimized positions are understood prior to potential actions being taken.
2. Ability to accurately quantify change
   Analytics draws a deeper understanding of behaviors and what these behaviors may look like in the future. This allows your planning resources to have accurate insight and provides the opportunity to leverage collective knowledge to suggest alternative courses of action.
3. Agility to react quickly when changes arise
   One thing we can count on is that tomorrow will not look like today. In the compliance and internal audit world new and unforeseen issues always arise to require an immediate response. With our planning solution, you will have the power and agility to quickly and dynamically adjust your plans on the fly.

By using Grant Thornton’s analytic solutions, including Resource Optimizer, organizations can be empowered to identify profit-maximizing decisions, understand trade-offs, and improve communications and collaboration while minimizing the risk and regulatory exposure to the business in today’s climate.

For additional information and details on these offerings, please contact:

Contact: