Gary Lynam, Director of ERM Advisory at Protecht
As a fast-growing remittance firm specialising in digital P2P money transfers for 5.7 million customers, in 70 currencies across 130 countries, WorldRemit also has over 1,000 employees working across a multitude of regulated jurisdictions so its first-line executives need risk control and management to be efficient and effective.
Following rapid growth in recent years, WorldRemit needed to upgrade its largely manual enterprise risk management(ERM) platform. Until this point, risk had been managed through a series of spreadsheets, which were difficult to consolidate and could not proactively manage risk. Producing risk reports was time-consuming and prone to human error as the data had to be consolidated by hand from multiple sources. Action tracking was also carried out manually with a lack of optimisation.
The perils of manual ERM
At the same time, staff engagement was hampered because of the lack of data and analysis. This put the onus firmly on the central risk team, when what the company really needed was an efficient, scalable and reliable system that would empower each user to take ownership of ERM.
“We are a global company who needs to manage risk across geographies according to local regulations,” explains Tsam Jeffries, Director of Enterprise and Operational Risk at WorldRemit. “We have customers sending money from a particular country so we need a licence to operate in that country and must comply with fast-paced regulations.”
The company needed an easy-to-use, real-time solution that could manage risk in an asynchronous environment while complying with relevant regulations. It also wanted to enable cross-functional collaboration.
A fresh approach to risk
As a result, WorldRemit deployed Protecht.ERM, the most complete online risk management and operation resilience software and a new, proactive and more collaborative ERM culture is taking shape at WorldRemit. Protecht.ERM delivers risk event (or incident) reporting and remediation, risk and control self-assessment, and risk appetite and key risk indicators, while enabling group-wide information collection and improved risk oversight.
Protecht ERM live dashboards in board meetings and live staff workshops have prompted more informed discussion about risks to embed a better risk culture that involves all staff. “All our users can go into the system, update their own risk indicators and risk outcomes. That has been a game changer for us. The organisation as a whole is becoming more proactive to improve risk controls. Staff are better placed to identify new risks and thematic issues, and can take swift and accurate action when necessary and feel empowered to do so,” comments Jeffries.
“The dashboard function has been very helpful, pulling out actions based on risks we have raised, findings, board decisions, which we can actively use in our risk management meetings,” adds Jeffries. “That level of discussion would have been impossible before. As visibility flows upwards to the board level, we can filter views and reporting so the top tier sees the highest risk, while the lower tier sees a broader population.”
The solution has now been extended to include Boards and Committee management, policy document management, internal audits, risk and compliance deep dives and assurance reviews, and project risk management. Protecht now enables WorldRemit to understand the risk it carries and to build an overall risk profile related to each function.
“We knew the big ticket risks but now we are seeing under the hood the operational risks which we previously hadn’t realised – and with the cross-functionality, we can see the same risks from different angles and combine them for a better overall picture,” continues Jeffries.
Introducing seamless digitalisation
WorldRemit can now easily consolidate data from a wide range of digital and paper-based sources without effort and make it available to the right users. These users know their actions at all times and how these assignments relate to policies, controls and events, making them more productive. What used to take days, now takes minutes – in a few clicks, managers can consolidate real-time data from multiple sources and create custom reports for boards, committees and regulators.
Protecht.ERM provides a holistic view of the entire organisation, while also drilling down into granular views of individual subsidiaries and departments, all based on a single source of truth, accessible across the business. Following the success of the initial deployment, WorldRemit has already rolled out a number of Protecht modules.
“It has been simple to customise modules to meet our requirements, which, given we operate in 130 countries, is critical,” concludes Jeffries. “We are deploying nine modules which give us the functionality and compliance we need to do business with confidence.”
