Q&A: Financial Institutions Reduce Risk With Clarity

Few industries are as competitive or regulated as the financial services industry. Compliance, security, and privacy must drive everything that happens, and margins are frequently razor thin. In this environment, risk can derail a business quickly, and it is essential that it be managed effectively and efficiently. We spoke to representatives from several financial services companies to understand how they do that.

What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?

For us, the main challenges we face are with hidden risks – the risks that we weren’t consciously aware that we were exposing ourselves to. We tend to associate risk with compliance in the financial services industry, but there are smaller things that still impact us and affect our ability to optimize performance like standalone, manual systems and duplicated processes.

Those subtle issues really showed up in our project planning and delivery. We had multiple streams for capturing and tracking work, many of them utilizing online file sharing or spreadsheets for management. That resulted in inefficiencies, the wrong work being prioritized, and mistakes being made when things were missed. The risks associated with that alone were enormous, especially given how much money we spend on projects every year.

How do you go about addressing those problems?

It’s a combination of process and tools. We need to standardize how we capture intake, prioritize work, and track business needs. But we also need the ability to report on and analyze all those work demands so that we can make the best decision for the business – eliminating unnecessary risk and creating an effective and efficient approach to all of our discretionary investments.

What do you do, and how does it help?

We selected Clarity by Broadcom and used that as the basis for a new approach to tracking and managing demand. Clarity consolidated all our intake into one solution and provided all stakeholders with a complete and accurate picture of what we needed to do, why it was necessary, and how it supported our strategies. We could generate powerful reports that were contextualized for each stakeholder group and analyzed different investment mixes to understand the impacts on all aspects of our business.

How is this driving your success?

It has reduced our risk exposure immensely. We eliminated all those old manual tools almost overnight, and Clarity gives us a single source of truth for all intake. We don’t have to worry if there is "missing" work trapped in a spreadsheet somewhere; our decision making is based on a complete picture of all demand at all times.

This change has resulted in better business decisions, which has in turn improved performance against our goals and objectives, critical in this industry. Clarity also allows us to connect all our strategic priorities with the work that we are doing, improving the quality of the demand and providing the people doing the work with greater understanding of why their work is important. That drives engagement and further reduces our risk exposure.