Planning Checklist: What’s Ahead for Your Governance, Risk & Compliance Initiatives

September 26, 2024

At ViClarity, governance, risk and compliance (GRC) initiatives are always top of mind, both for our own business and on behalf of our clients. Whether you’re working on the next year's plan and budget or just looking ahead, we’ve compiled this checklist of important questions to ask yourself and your team to ensure you’re thinking through some key considerations.

Download Checklist

Strategic Planning

• Are we as efficient as we could be? Should we explore technology solutions to help save time and reduce manual processes?
• Are our strategic and corporate plans centralized in a system where we can track progress?
• Have we defined KPIs and do we have an automated process for gathering metrics?
• Do we have the capability to quickly identify trends to make data-driven decisions based on frequent and consistent evaluation?

Risk Management

• Has our organization’s tolerance toward previously identified risks changed?
• Are the prevention and mitigation plans we have in place sufficient or do they need to be updated?
• Do we have a system in place for managing and testing our risk controls periodically?
• Are we monitoring changes to key risk indicators and tracking events that may result in losses or increased risks?

Regulatory Compliance

• Have our regulators introduced any new rules or updates that impact our business processes?
• Is our team trained on all applicable policies and procedures?
• Do we have a systematic way to track and manage corrective action plans for areas where we are out of compliance?
• Do our processes support clear, easy-to-produce reports for our executives and board members?
• Are we managing internal and external audits efficiently and consistently?

Vendor Management

• Are we following consistent processes for evaluating new vendors and suppliers?
• Do we have automation in place to assist with ongoing due diligence tasks?
• Are our vendor documents and contracts stored and organized in a centralized location?
• Do we have workflows in place to track action steps and provide an audit trail?

Whether you have budget to spend this year or you’re planning ahead, it’s good to begin evaluating potential technology and professional services providers well in advance of your target implementation date so you can guide your organization toward more efficient, effective business operations.

Bonus Tip: Check out this simple Time Savings Calculator tool for a peek at how automation tools could streamline your processes.

Originally published as "Checklist: 2024 Planning — What's Ahead for Your GRC Initiatives?" in FinTech Global and RegTech Analyst on October 3, 2023. 

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