Risk Management Conference: Positive Vibes from All Corners

The Risk Management Association’s (RMA) premier annual event, the Risk Management Conference, came to an end on 6 November, and Tookitaki had the privilege to attend the event which we believe was a success in a number of ways. As a modern-era technology player in the risk and compliance space, our objectives for the event focused on industry and regulatory changes and future challenges in credit risk, operational risk and enterprise risk. As a new entrant in the US market and having continuous learning as a core value, Tookitaki aimed at gathering deep industry perspectives and insights from esteemed leaders to better our solutions in the anti-money laundering and reconciliation spaces as well as meeting risk professionals and share our cutting-edge research and innovations.

We were able to meet with numerous chief risk officers and chief credit officers, all of whom see the move from manual and rules-based approaches to risk and compliance to more sophisticated analytic systems, such as machine learning systems, as vital to protecting their organizations against evolving risks and to ensure proper compliance. In particular, these executives all shared a similar story about existing systems producing extremely high false positive risk and compliance alerts, thereby requiring highly inefficient and costly manual reviews. These senior risk executives also expressed deep concern that their existing rules- based systems, and indeed human reviewers, are missing new/unknown patterns and entities that pose a high risk to their organizations.  For an event that had 700 attendees and about 40 solution vendors, it was instructive to hear that across the board there is not just a willingness to consider more sophisticated monitoring and screening systems but indeed an imperative to use such systems from these executives’ perspectives. With what most executives expect to be a downturn in the economy in the next several years, they stated that proper risk and compliance systems and techniques will become even more important as criminal activity often increases and/or morphs during these downturns.

We were very pleased to know that the industry is getting more and more confident about the ability, and indeed need, of machine learning to solve increasingly complex risk and compliance issues. The Head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), who was a keynote speaker, acknowledged that machine learning and other advanced analytic techniques and solutions are critical to solving industry risk and regulatory compliance requirements going forward, and that he expects these approaches to be adopted heavily throughout the industry.

Tookitaki thanks all who spoke with our representative Gregg Brettand is looking forward to engaging with them in the near future to help ensure a better compliant and risk-balanced banking world.