
Global Risk 2020: It’s Time for Banks to Self-Disrupt
Risk, treasury, and compliance can help banks return to profitability. But success will require digitizing beyond the edges and redesigning core processes.
As a trusted partner for clients in their most critical moments, BCG helps ensure that compliance, ESG, and regulatory risk management continually enhance risk visibility, enabling a more nimble response to change and uncertainty.
Sanctions, money laundering, environmental regulations, third-party risks. We all know the damage that regulatory compliance failures can do. Less recognized—but perhaps more powerful—is the integrity that strong compliance functions create. BCG’s regulatory compliance consulting enhances your risk management system, ensuring that you are prepared for a crisis, responsive to change, and unfailingly compliant with the organizations that oversee your industry.
BCG’s regulatory compliance consulting takes a landscape view of your company-specific vulnerabilities, considering your business strategy, governance, regulatory framework, and risk management cycle. Depending on your unique situation, whether responding to a crisis or pursuing a transformation, we can tailor our support to meet your areas of need:
For compliance in banking, insurance, health care, and energy, we help companies address new consumer behavior, evolving business models, and shifting rules, often by redesigning core processes to enable digital regulatory and compliance-monitoring solutions.
Banks, for example, have seen financial crime alerts and the resultant know-your-customer (KYC) reviews increase exponentially in the wake of the pandemic. BCG has designed an upfront risk triage that identifies risks early, providing a window to second-line oversight—particularly as new products and processes are designed and developed.
In the energy, insurance, and health care industries, extreme weather and natural disasters, new technologies, increased exposure to cyber attacks and fraud, and political, social, and public health instability have dramatically shifted risk profiles. To battle this surge in nonfinancial risk, BCG helps compliance functions in these industries shift from being steady custodians to strategic leaders involved in core business operations and planning.
Employing data analytics capabilities and our experts in AI, predictive modeling, and digital compliance, we identify solutions to improve risk monitoring and responsiveness to changes in industry-specific rules and guidelines.
We then work with your stakeholders across the organization to deepen a culture of compliance through active participation in the transformation or crisis response. Along the way, we integrate the expertise of the following specialty partners:
BCG GAMMA guides us on advanced behavioral analysis—including customer behavior and employee conduct—and in the calibration of monitoring systems that detect fraud.
BCG Platinion supports our evaluation of internal and external IT solutions and guides our IT implementations, including vendor selection.
Our regulatory compliance consultants are experts in your sector and in compliance, and many are former regulators, who understand the complexity involved in creating and responding to changing requirements.
BCG worked with a large EU bank whose regulatory spending already exceeded the competitive benchmark when COVID-19 hit Europe. The goal was to identify and implement the right cost reduction levers. By taking such steps as eliminating nonregulatory projects and project overlaps, making a perimeter reduction to regulatory requirements, and revising pricing and consolidating vendors, we helped reduce costs by 25% to 30%.
Risk, treasury, and compliance can help banks return to profitability. But success will require digitizing beyond the edges and redesigning core processes.
Agile may seem risky and impractical for regulatory projects, but it offers extraordinary benefits and can give banks an edge over competitors.
Risk has to be managed at the business level, says BCG's Matteo Coppola. Risk management winners will be those that deal with regulations by embedding risk in the early stages of strategy and planning.
Outside forces may have dictated the path following the recession period, but today’s banks have an opportunity to lead the way. Those with foresight will recognize that the road to resilience starts with digitization.
Banks’ regulatory compliance functions are under pressure after massive fines in recent years. New operating models and smart technologies offer financial institutions a fresh approach.