Automating Branch Governance and Monitoring Branch Health

Banking, Business Process Management | Gautam Rastogi

The BFSI industry is faced with a troika of challenges – Increase reach to respond to the larger challenge of financial inclusion, consolidate costs and control revenue leakages,  each pulling its own weight and posing a constant management challenge.

The Audit department is the entity that ensures that the pull & push of operations are evenly balanced and the organizational objectives are not compromised and unilaterally pulled in one direction.

The target of increasing the customer base puts pressure on the prudential and KYC norms. Instances of mis-selling and addressing varied demographics has put extra emphasis on better and frequent audit coverage of the branches coupled with larger sample size array. The cost consolidation exercises have seen reduction in audit teams but greater demand on their time, skill and thorough inspection to proactively contain frauds and revenue leakages.

This is a situation where Branch Governance automation holds significant promise as it helps to build assurance for the Management Team and  streamlines the audit processes to:

a) Facilitate efficient management of internal resources – the internal audit & risk team,

b) Facilitate their working to make them more efficient and accountable,

c) Provide timely inputs to the audit team; and

d) Most importantly the tool enables the top management to get a real time view of all open issues, audit response and to keep track of the impact (materiality) of the open issues

Key features of such a solution would be:

a) Risk based Audit Planning to direct resources to high priority / impact areas

b) Scheduling of audit resources for optimum utilization of time

c) Centralized checklist management and aggregation of knowledge which can be used to revise and update the audit points. Eg. The ORM team may maintain a checklist separate from the Branch Governance team which would be quite different from the IT Governance team’s checklist

d) Dashboard view of audit progress, open issues and audit response,

The audit ratings when combined  with the empirical data of the branch viz Total Premium, Number of accounts serviced, renewals etc. would give a true and fair assessment of the health and criticality of the “branch” and material impact of the associated “risks”.

Newgen Benefit

Newgen offers an out of the box solution that could be implemented in less than 10 calendar weeks and the organization can start accruing the benefits within a business quarter. While being amenable to the current practices, it still allows standardization of processes and organization specific customization.

Bio: Gautam (CISA) is Head - GRC Automation at Newgen Software Technologies Ltd.