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Savvy CFOs are Using Data Analytics to Mitigate Risks

Data analytics has shifted from being “just a fad” to a business necessity. Once considered the playground of marketing, data analytics has entered the mainstream stream business. Companies are no longer investing in data and analytics with the sole purpose of aiding marketers and drive revenues.

Rather, they are also exploring the opportunities of data analytics application in risk management.

The risk landscape is changing fast and this is driven mostly by increased volatility, heightened economic and political uncertainty, intense regulatory complexity, high-profile data breaches, rising employee fraud, shifting consumer habits and preferences, and increased competition.

As a result of these fundamental changes the strategic conversation around risk is changing too. Thus, business leaders should embrace risk as a tool used to create value and achieve higher performance. It is no longer something to only fear, minimize and avoid.

Applying data and analytics to an organization’s risk efforts plays an important role in strengthening internal controls. Implementing stronger controls is essential for avoiding and reducing substantial financial and reputational losses.

Companies that have previously placed little value or emphasis on strengthening internal controls have learned the hard way, and for many, the wake-up call came too late.

High-profile Data Breaches

The number of cyber attacks and ensuing data breaches is at alarming rate. Hackers are targeting companies across all industries and stealing treasure troves of data for criminal proceeds. Recently, a global cyber attack “WannaCry” halted service delivery and brought businesses and countries to their knees, locking people out of their data and demanding they pay a ransom or lose everything.

In the wake of these massive data attacks, companies are waking up to the realization that they need to strengthen their cyber resilience programs.

Investing in data analytics is one way of achieving this, and CFOs are uniquely positioned within the organization to drive the analytics efforts. Although data is the oil of the new digital economy, finance executives must look at data in two ways – as a source of risk and as a means to manage the risk.

Real-time Monitoring of Data

This is essential for reducing the potential of data breaches and better protect strategic data of the company. The CFO can help monitor the company’s data by performing real-time data-flow analysis and outlier analysis.

The former involves tracking the location of data at different times during a business process. Internet of Things (IoT) has brought about new ways of collecting and storing large quantities of data sets.

For instance, sensors are being installed in machines, clothing items, delivery vehicles, wearable devices, company products etc and these minute devices are capable of transmitting the data to an internal server for further analysis and insight generation.

Majority of the data hacking incidents happen at night when business have shut down for the day. It is this period that companies are more prone to cyber breaches.

By regularly conducting data-flow analysis, personnel responsible for data security will be able to detect any unusual data queries being made on the company’s database during a certain period, and compare that number with trends over the last month, quarter, year or longer.

If a trend is identified, this should act as a starting point for asking specific questions around data security and trigger responses.

Outlier analysis, mostly used by credit and debit card companies and other financial institutions, helps identify anomalies in the customer’s transaction history. Based on the historical transactions of the credit or debit card holder or customer over a period of time, the company is able to develop a profile for each and every customer.

Suppose one of your clients resides in Location A where he or she mostly transacts from, one day you notice that soon after recording a transaction in Location A another large sum transaction is recorded in Location B within a short period of time and the commuting distance between A and B is long making it impossible for your customer to be in one place at one time, this transaction must immediately be flagged up as an outlier and tell you that something is unusual.

Thus, as the purchasing history data of your customers increase, more focus should be placed on real-time outlier analysis. Thanks to technological innovation, today’s computers have massive computing power to store and perform this critical analysis on very large datasets.

Make Use of Both Structured and Unstructured Data

Structured data is easy to analyze because it is highly organized and predictable. Unstructured data is essentially the opposite, it takes more effort and time to compile.

However, much of the company’s data is unstructured, and this where CFOs can uncover perils and act almost immediately to avert hazards.

Thus, as social media networks continue to grow in use, finance executives need to find meaningful ways of combining data from multiple sources, regardless of location or format, for analysis.

It is through this combination and analysis of disparate datasets that finance is able to make informed analysis and provide improved decision support.

Many brands have suffered mishaps because of poor or misaligned social media strategies. For instance, a negative tweet was allowed to go viral before the company could hardly respond leading to damaged reputations.

Thus, having a coherent and well executed social media plan will help you detect any external threats to the company’s reputation. One negative tweet has the massive potential to make you lose your key customers and shut door.

In high performing companies, CFOs are taking advantage of new technologies and keeping an ear on the ground in order to hear what is being said about their companies on social media platforms.

This new software has the capabilities to gather and combine data from various social media platforms concerning the company’s products, services, competitors etc.

They have also deployed teams to provide round-the-clock monitoring of social media activities.

When this data is analyzed and insights gleaned, the company can reach out to the message source, tell its side of the story and resolve any differences. Better more, the company is also able to trigger a response ahead of any negative story.

Retail companies are making use of image-recognition software to detect product issues while they sit on market shelves and ensure these errors are corrected well in advance. Using their smartphones, sales reps can snap photos of the company’s products. The software then makes an instant visual analysis of the photos leading to corrective measures being taken.

Email Risk and Fraud Prevention

As employee fraud continue to skyrocket, email use, in its unstructured form, is getting special attention. If fraud perpetrators are not detected well in advance and their plans allowed to flourish, the organization stands to lose hundreds if not millions of dollars.

It is therefore imperative that companies invest more time and resources analyzing the email patterns of their employees. For example, real-time monitoring of patterns in the metadata of employees’ email communications can help you reveal risks before they take centre stage.

You need to look at clues such as – Who is the email being sent to? What is the subject and the nature of the content? Is the email high priority or low priority? Who is copied and blind copied? What time of the day is the email sent?

Investigating such information can help you monitor incoming and outgoing email traffic of specific groups or individuals, locate high risk areas that you need to look into and also establish if restricted company information is being released to the public either accidentally or on purpose.

The success and power of data analytics in achieving value-adding risk management depends heavily on the quality and preciseness of the questions asked, the organization’s ability to gather data that addresses these questions, the integrity of the data gathered and the ability of users to draw insights from the data in an objective manner.

Before investing in data analytics software, first identify the challenges your business is currently facing and ask the critical key performance questions that you want answers for.

Thanks for sharing:

Related posts:

  1. Finance Analytics: It’s Not About the Size of The Data
  2. Finance Analytics: Using The Right Data to Generate Actionable Insights
  3. Data Analytics and the FP&A Function
  4. Big Data: Lessons from the Leaders
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The Art of Risk Management

This is the title of the article by BCG published a few years ago. The article discusses the principles that should govern the approach to risk management by companies of all shapes and sizes.

The authors make several points with which I agree. Here are some excerpts:

  • Risk management is essential in today’s volatile economy. In a continuously changing economic environment, companies cannot assume a stable risk landscape.
  • Stop thinking of risk management as primarily a regulatory issue. Embed risk management in the mindset of the broader organization.
  • Risk management is a value-creating activity that is an essential part of the strategic conversation inside the company. The goal of that discussion should not be to eliminate or minimize risk but to use it to create a competitive advantage.
  • Risk management starts at the top. The organization needs to demonstrate that it has made risk management a high priority and an integral part of the decision-making process by appointing a dedicated risk leader who reports back frequently to the CEO and the board to discuss the latest trends and any changes in the company’s risk scenarios.
  • Risk cannot be managed from an ivory tower. Risk Management should not exist in isolation from the rest of the organization, with an insufficiently granular understanding of the actual business-specific risks the company faces. To avoid this outcome, integrate risk management into the company’s entire routine management processes, including planning, capital allocation, controlling, and reporting.
    • Understand the scope of the risks the company faces.
    • Plan for how the company will manage those risks.
    • Act to mitigate the risks or take advantage of strategic opportunities.
  • Avoid relying on black boxes. Although sometimes appropriate, over-reliance on complex metrics or models can muddy the risk management process, turning it from a transparent management activity into a frustrating black box. The appropriate level of complexity is company-specific and depends on the industry, business model, availability of data, level of experience, and mandatory legal requirements.
  • Align risk management with a company’s overall business strategy. Companies need to identify all relevant risks – not just those that can be easily quantified. Some of the relevant risks for a company may be those that are qualitative and especially difficult to quantify.
  • Risk management is more than a policy; it is a culture. The objective of a company’s risk-management system should be not only to enforce new policies but also to create a risk-aware culture that addresses risks proactively, not reactively, and manages them to create new sources of competitive advantage.
  • Effective risk management depends on the free flow of information throughout the organization. Unless employees at all levels of the organization are actively involved in the risk management process, it will be difficult to maintain the unrestricted flow of information. This can result in the most important data getting buried in one part of the organization unavailable to other parts of the business.
  • Risk management deals with uncertain futures. As a result, the goal should not be to develop precise metrics or future outcomes but to strive for a general understanding of the probabilities and potential impact of various trends or scenarios on business performance and enable decision-makers to confront the uncertain nature of risk and act accordingly.
  • Risk management is never about finding “the answer.” Rather, it is about continually refining the organization’s assumptions about the future and its understanding of the implications of those assumptions for the company’s business. Assumptions about risk often change quickly, so the relevant parameters, probabilities, impacts, and correlations should be revisited frequently.
  • It is possible to prepare for unknown risks by building an organization that so excels at crisis management that it is resilient even in situations in which it is blindsided by unprecedented challenges. For example, through developing the ability to detect, capture, and exploit information patterns as well as to think outside existing frameworks and risk landscapes.
  • Avoid the downside, but don’t forget the upside. Companies should use risk management also to identify new opportunities and to exploit them systematically. For example, scenario planning should be used to define not only worst-case scenarios but also best-case scenarios. Think in advance about how a company can make the best use of the latest market developments and trends and ultimately make the right decisions.

I enjoyed reading the article and highly recommend it.

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Leading in Uncertain Times

One of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today is making the right decisions that will ensure their organizations succeed, survive, and remain competitive in an increasingly uncertain and complex environment.

A recent post, The best way to lead in uncertain times may be to throw out the playbook, by Strategy+Business has several good points.

The article is about the COVID-19 pandemic, how global companies navigated through the crisis, and how best to prepare for future disruptions. Here are some key points and my comments.

  • Rather than follow a rigid blueprint, executives must help organizations focus on sensing and responding to unpredictable market conditions.
    • Comment: Senior leaders play a vital role in providing clarity about the organization’s strategic direction, creating alignment on key priorities to ensure the achievement of enterprise objectives, and ensuring the business model is continuously evolving to create and capture value in the face of uncertainty. They must not rest on their laurels and stick to the beliefs and paradigms that got them to where they are today and hope they will carry them through tomorrow. Regulatory changes, new products, competition, markets, technologies, and shifts in customer behavior are upending many outdated assumptions about business success. Thus, the businesses you have today are different from the ones you will need in the future hence the importance of continuously sensing changes in the global economy. Employees and teams often feed off the energy of their leaders and tend to focus their attention where the leader focuses attention. If the leader is comfortable with current business practices and rarely embraces the future or challenges the status quo, then the team is highly likely to follow suit.
  • When it became clear that supply chains and other operations would fracture, organizations began scenario planning to shift production sources, relocate employees, and secure key supplies.
    • Comment: Instead of using scenario planning to anticipate the future and prepare for different outcomes, it seems most of the surveyed organizations used scenario planning as a reactionary tool. Don’t wait for a crisis or a shift in the market to start thinking about the future. The world is always changing. As I wrote in The Resilient Organization, acknowledge that the future is a range of possible outcomes, learn and develop capabilities to map out multiple future scenarios, develop an optimal strategy for each of those scenarios, then continually test the effectiveness of these strategies. This does not necessarily mean that every change in the market will impact your business. Identify early warnings of what might be important and pay closer attention to those signals. In other words, learn to separate the signals from the noise.
  • The pandemic forced the organization’s senior management team to re-examine how all decisions were made.
    • Comment: Bureaucracy has for a very long time stood in the way of innovation and agility. To remain innovative and adapt quickly in a fast-changing world, the organization must have nimble leadership and an empowered workforce where employees at all levels can dream up new ideas and bring them to life. Identifying and acting on emerging threats and potential opportunities is not the job of the leader alone but every team member. To quote Rita McGrath, in her book Seeing Around Corners, she writes, “Being able to detect weak signals that things are changing requires more eyes and ears throughout the organization. The critical information that informs decision-making is often locked in individual brains.” In addition to the internal environment, the leader must also connect with the external environment (customers, competitors, regulators, and other stakeholders), looking for what is changing and how.
  • It’s worthwhile for leaders of any team to absorb the lessons of sense-respond-adapt, even if there is no emergency at hand.
  • Sensing: Treat the far-flung parts of your enterprise as listening stations. The question leaders must ask is, “What are we learning from our interactions beyond the usual information about costs and sales?” Train your people to listen for potentially significant anomalies and ensure that important information is not trapped in organizational silos.
    • Comment: Cost and sales data are lagging indicators that reveal the consequences or outcomes of past activities and decisions. Although this information can help leaders spot trends by looking at patterns over time, it doesn’t help understand the future and inform what needs to be done for the numbers to tell a different story. In addition to lagging indicators, pay attention to current and leading indicators and understand the relationship between these indicators and outcomes.
  • Responding: Improve communication across intra- and inter-organizational boundaries. Leaders should view business continuity as an essential function that acts as connective tissue for the enterprise.
    • Comment: In addition to creating mechanisms that allow the free flow of information both inside and outside the organization, decision-makers should also be comfortable receiving information that challenges their personal view of the world, even if it’s not what they want to hear. Create a culture of psychological safety where people are not afraid to share bad news for fear of getting punished, but rather are acknowledged and rewarded for speaking up. Leveraging the diversity of thought enables leaders to anticipate the future as an organization, decide what to do about it collectively, and then mobilize the organization to do what’s necessary.
  • Adapting: Challenge assumptions, and question orthodoxies. There’s always the temptation to mitigate threats simply by applying existing practices harder and faster. One way to get at those deeper issues and encourage double-loop learning is to ask, “What needs to be true for this to be the right approach?”
    • Comment: In an increasingly uncertain environment, it’s difficult to survive and thrive with an old business model or outdated technologies. Many businesses fail because they continue doing the same thing for too long, and they don’t respond quickly enough and effectively when conditions change. As a leader, stay curious and connected to the external environment, look for market shifts, understand what needs to be regularly refreshed and reimagined, adopt new technologies and capabilities, and adapt in ordinary times but also during times of transition. Unfortunately for many leaders, it’s just more convenient for them to continually downplay the fact that conditions are changing than take the appropriate course of action that drives business success.

How are you preparing your organization for potential future disruptions?

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The Collaborative Organization

These days the term collaboration has become synonymous with organizational culture, creativity, innovation, increased productivity, and success.

Let’s look at the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. At the peak of the crisis, several companies instructed their workers to adopt remote working as a health and safety precautionary measure.

Two years into the pandemic, they are now asking their employees back to the office full time or are planning to adopt a hybrid model.

The need to preserve our collaborative culture and accelerate innovation are two of the top benefits being cited by organizational and team leaders for bringing workers back.

Collaboration is indeed essential for the achievement of team goals, functional objectives, and the overall success of the organization.

Today’s breakthrough innovations are emerging from many interacting teams and collaborative relationships.

When teams, functions, and organizations collaborate, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; group genius emerges, and creativity unfolds.

But, what makes a successful collaboration? What are the key enabling conditions?

  • It extends beyond the boundaries of the organization. Business success is a function of internal and external relationships. Instead of viewing your business in vacuo, understand that you are part of an ecosystem. External to your organization, who do you need to partner with to enhance your value creation processes, achieve/exceed your objectives, or successfully execute your strategy?
  • Ensure the objectives are clear and there is shared understanding by everyone. Unclear objectives are one of the topmost barriers to team and organizational performance.
  • Foster a culture that encourages opinions and ideas that challenge the consensus. People should feel free to share their ideas and not hold back for fear of others penalizing them or thinking less of them. Collaboration is hindered when one or two people dominate the discussion, are arrogant, or don’t think they can learn anything from others.
  • Groups perform more effective under certain circumstances, and less effective under others. There is a tendency to fixate on certain topics of discussion amongst groups which often leaves members distracted from their ideas. To reduce the negative effects of topic fixation, members of the group should be given periods to work alone and switch constantly between individual activity and group interaction.
  • Effective collaboration can happen if the people involved come from diverse backgrounds and possess complementary skills to prevent conformity. The best collective decisions or creative ideas are often a product of different bodies of knowledge, multiple opinions, disagreement, and divergent thought processes, not consensus or compromise.
  • New technologies are making collaboration easier than ever, enabling us to increase our reach and broaden our network. Although new technology helps, it will not make your organization collaborative without the right culture and values in place. First, define what you want to achieve through collaboration then use these tools to promote creative collaboration.

How else are you championing collaboration within your organization to create value and succeed?

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