Riskonnect
Salesforce Powered Integrated Risk Management

The enterprise risk landscape is rapidly changing. While technological advances are opening new doors of opportunities, they are also driving organizations to rethink their business models. Today, insights necessary to derive informed business decisions related to governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) have become ever more imperative. In a recent interview with Quin Rodriguez, VP of Strategic Marketing at Riskonnect, we discuss the key to improve management of risks and internal controls that can truly help business as break down individual silos, establish common risk management processes, and improve visibility and transparency into their GRC processes.

What are some of the pain-points pertaining to contemporary collaboration solutions? How does Riskonnect address the same?

The major concern of risk managers today is that risk data is widely dispersed across their organization and is not shared across business unit silos. Businesses today are run by dedicated experts and these experts often work in homogenous groups largely separate and independent from others, dealing with the numerous regulatory, reputational, and operational risks that are part and parcel of today’s corporate landscape. Equally challenging is that many businesses fall short when it comes to identifying, capturing, analyzing, and utilizing risk information effectively to respond to risk scenarios. To be truly effective, a trusted partner that can assist companies in effective risk management and implementation of their GRC strategies by effectively connecting and aligning their assets, people, activities, and goals is essential.

That’s the role we play at Riskonnect, an independent and privately held firm providing integrated risk management technology solutions. Part of the Thoma Bravo family, Riskonnect offers a robust integrated risk management (IRM) platform that can provide organizations a holistic view of range of risks they face, along with mitigants, costs, and impact for those risks. Our IRM platform helps organizations better manage risks, reduce liability, improve performance and increase stakeholder value. Designed with a fully integrated and highly configurable suite of complementary capabilities, our IRM platform facilitates and encourages the capture, analysis, and delivery of risk information, giving organizations a greater ability to act more quickly and intelligently to respond to both risks and opportunities in their respective markets. Through our strategic, operational, and insurable risk software applications, we help organizations to make the necessary remedies and focus on achieving business outcomes.

Please shed some light on the features and functionalities of your platform. How does Riskonnect enable users to mitigate risks?

What’s unique about Riskonnect is that we have built our platform on the Force.com cloud-computing platform provided by Salesforce.com.

The platform can support internal audits, risk and claims management, business continuity management and more, all from a single point of access, in the same hierarchy and version, yet separate through security and personas. It is a true cloud-first, data-centric platform that integrates enterprise-wide risk assessments and provides organizations the ability to manage risks across their operating units. By enabling organizations to integrate data that traditionally has been housed in multiple systems, we provide their risk managers with a single version of the truth. We ensure that all the information is aggregated and normalized on the back end, the result of which is leveraged while performing risk mitigation, compliance, audit, environmental, and IT management. A major factor contributing to the uniqueness of Riskonnect is its ability to deliver a superior user experience through complete visualization of GRC data along with simplified information sharing.

With Salesforce as our underpinning architecture, our goal at Riskonnect is to empower an organization to grow and scale under a single unified model, driving efficiency at the business level. Additionally, we offer a robust, embedded, business intelligence engine that enables organizations to discover hidden insights and perform predictive analytics to foresee the impact of risks. It also provides visibility into the status of risk mitigation across the enterprise.

In essence, we truly revolutionize the GRC space with our unified approach and an integrated IRM platform that helps organizations proactively monitor risks and improve business performance.

Can you provide a case study that highlights the usability of your Salesforce-powered platform?

One of our clients comes immediately to mind, whose success perfectly illustrates our value proposition. It is a large business services firm that serves airports, schools, prisons, hotels, hospitals and more, and it was critically challenged by high risk profiles and an extremely complex hierarchy of managing 800 key SOX controls. The client’s risk managers were struggling to improve operational efficiencies in risk management and corporate governance through accurate and timely risk identification and assessment across all locations and lines of business. They were also trying to solve their most pressing risk management challenges: normalizing and aggregating risk information for financial reporting.

By leveraging Riskonnect’s IRM platform for SOX compliance, the organization was able to get information out of the silos and aggregate all of the risk data into a central repository. The platform's lower total cost of ownership (TCO), simplicity in functionality, and ease of configuration, along with our experience and expertise of our internal deployment services, enabled the client to realize substantial cost savings in the first year of deployment.

How does the future look like for the company in the next 12 to 18 months?

Riskonnect plans to empower more enterprises globally to help them achieve their goals of integrated risk management and a strong risk culture. We will also continue to help them make transitions to new technologies and enhance service models in order to deliver the highest business value in the upcoming years. With an ethos rooted in constant innovation and an intense focus on customer success, we will continue to place organizations on the leading edge by incorporating the evolving technologies into our solutions and services, significantly maximizing the ROI for clients.