Navigating Digital Transformation:
Choosing the right risk technology partner for success
The right technology and analytics for your transformation
Technology has an almost unlimited ability to transform and supercharge businesses – if implemented in the right way and configured to properly address the needs and challenges of the organisation and its customers. Equally, the wrong technology, or poorly implemented systems can have the reverse effect, exposing your business to financial crime or reputational risk and worse, permanently damaging customer experience and loyalty.
This is why it’s vitally important for any business embarking on a digital transformation process of any kind to carefully consider and choose technology partners with the right credentials that will help ensure a successful outcome. A true partner will instinctively understand your needs, through deep sector expertise and extensive on-the-ground experience. They will work closely with you to design and configure a solution that will fully answer the brief.
They will understand that business-critical systems must be operationally resilient not to risk creating points of failure when integrated with legacy systems. And they will maintain a regular dialogue with you, pursuing a process of continuous improvement and adjustment to changing needs, evolving regulation and scaling as your business grows.
LexisNexis® Risk Solutions - a Global Authority
Combining innovation, transformative technology, analytical proficiency and deep market insight, we’ve been at the forefront of shaping fraud prevention, financial crime compliance and identity verification risk management for over 15 years.
Market-leading insights
Fraud, KYC, Financial Crime Compliance, Credit Risk, and Identity Authentication solutions are often at the core of digital transformation programmes, and for good reason. Coupled with recent developments in AI, Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics, there are multiple opportunities to improve responses to the latest economic crime challenges that can threaten the survival of any organisation.
When you consider that Juniper Research recently reported that businesses are set to invest over $6.5 billion dollars globally in AI fraud prevention solutions by 2027 – it’s essential that businesses are working with an experienced partner that will help ensure their sizeable investment gives them the best possible returns.
So how do businesses set about finding the right technology partner that can help them to realise their integration, automation and digitisation strategies, speed up their digital transformation and achieve a positive ROI?
To help your business on its path to digital excellence and maximise your returns, you should demand that any prospective risk technology transformation vendor can deliver on these four key strengths;
The right skills or domain expertise
Complex digital transformation projects require technology partners to have sufficient depth of experience. They must understand the kinds of risks that your company typically faces, to ensure that any solutions you deploy concurrently are going to be a good fit – both in terms of internal processes and systems, and the nuanced risks faced by those operating in your industry.
Data or technology partners with little or no track record of deploying complex anti-fraud or financial crime screening in your sector will often be blind to the nuanced calibration required for a solution to operate effectively. High false positives, botched deployments, damaged customer experience and significant delays in achieving return on value from your investment, could all be consequences of working with an inexperienced vendor.
Allied to this is a need for experience in IT development, data governance, project management and data science - as well as experience in successfully deploying transformative technology. Seek vendors with a clear, demonstrable track record of delivering IT projects at scale, to help you gauge how they will perform when it comes to advising you on your deployment.
Shaping our industry for over 15 years
LexisNexis Risk Solutions has a successful track record of assessing the evolving issues our customers face when addressing a multitude of fraud, financial crime, credit, or authentication risks. To enable us to help them with these challenges we’ve adopted a strategy of building, acquiring, and integrating solutions to help customers‘ gain access to best-of-breed technology and data analysis services when they need them.
Combining innovation, transformative technology, and deep market insight, we’ve been at the forefront of shaping fraud prevention, financial crime compliance and identity verification risk management for more than 15 years.
Ability to adapt and innovate at pace
A successful, long-term partnership with your digital transformation vendor requires a well-considered technology or development roadmap aligned to your business needs and scalable as it grows.
The path to digital transformation is littered with firms that heavily invested in deployment of a major system to help them address a business challenge only to find that it is woefully inept at adapting and evolving quickly enough to keep pace with fast-changing priorities. Long development request cycles, or delays with software patches and updates can significantly impact a firm’s ability to serve its customers or respond to market conditions.
Companies need to ask the right questions upfront. How is their partner’s ability to update or adapt solutions in a workable time frame? What does their technology investment roadmap look like? When it comes to new technology, you must make sure that your partner is constantly looking at bringing the latest capabilities into its architecture. If not, you risk ending up with an iterative evolution of aging technology and analytical techniques that may not account for the latest risks. Also ask whether your vendor’s roadmap is ambitious enough in scope to reassure you that they’re not going to be quickly usurped by other providers with more ambitious approaches and new capabilities.
McKinsey published this useful guide to help firms of all stripes assess the ambition and likely success of a technology roadmap.
Scale and stability for the long term
There are so many technology start-ups in the risk and regtech markets these days, offering all kinds of innovative, awe-inspiring solutions to address a multitude of risks. It can be tempting to invest in something that sounds and looks compelling and cutting-edge, without really looking ‘under the bonnet’ at whether the system has true scalability and stability needed to service your businesses entire operation.
Many fintech and regtech companies rely on private equity funding for a number of years into their evolutionary story. While that’s not a reason not to work with them, it does raise the question as to whether their systems truly have the capacity to handle the volume of data, transactions and queries that your business generates daily with little to no impact on performance, 24/7. And can they really be on hand 365 days of the year to support outages or deal with system critical issues, whenever you need them?
How long has the vendor been operating? Only 10% of start-ups fail in year one, but a staggering 70% have fallen by the wayside by years four or five. Are they a profitable business, or will they likely be engaged in future funding rounds to fund their growth? These are critical questions a business continuity team will want to know before onboarding.
Scalablity of the solution architecture and data analysis should also be explored. Many brands have to maintain extremely tight service level agreement timescales to meet customer expectations. These would also need to be capable of rapidly scaling as spikes in demand or growth occur. Can your partner demonstrate built-in resilience to deal with local or regional outages?
Realising the benefits of AI and Machine Learning in a BAU environment requires a healthy supply of sufficiently relevant and accurate historic data. Does your technology partner have access to this kind of data to support you in launching these new analysis techniques? Without it your hopes of reaping the full benefits of these new techniques to address your fraud, compliance or onboarding risk challenges will be short lived. Even worse, you could be left with inaccuracies and negative bias built into your decision making processes, seriously risking damage to your brand and significant compliance breaches.
Cultural fit – a partnership approach
A successful working relationship with a technology partner requires a constant dialogue to ensure that both performance and functionality is under constant review. Not all tech-vendors will have the right cultural fit or organisational capacity to properly fulfil this essential partnership role.
Essential questions for a prospective partner should probe the vendors approach to adapting solutions to fit the needs of a specific legacy system integration. Take the time to find out whether there’s a good culture fit. Does the vendor regularly operate things such as Customer Advisory Boards or Voice Of Customer product development sessions to nurture a strong and supportive working relationship? And do these sessions or meetings translate in to real-world adaptations and improvements into solutions in a commercially sensible timeframe?
A ‘partnership approach’ is something that many tech vendors will claim they excel at, because they know it’s what the customer wants to here. Buyer beware! Don’t take anything at face value. Long before a decision is made on a solution implementation, seek to understand how the vendor can evidence what ‘partnership’ means to them – and what experience, resource and track record they have of delivering on it.
Shaping the industry for the past 15 years
In conclusion, selecting the right technology partner for your digital transformation journey is paramount. The success of your business hinges on choosing a vendor with the right credentials and strengths to ensure a seamless transition and maximize returns on your investments. With the complexities of today's risk landscape, it's imperative to partner with a vendor with all of these qualities.
At LexisNexis Risk Solutions, we embody these strengths, backed by over 15 years of industry leadership, and trusted by global brands across various sectors. Choose a partner you can rely on to keep your digital transformation programme on track and achieve your business goals. Make the right choice today to secure your tomorrow.
