News
NEW - Sword is part of ARC Logics ARC Logics is a Wolters Kluwer business unit addressing audit, risk and compliance
Announcement - Sword is part of ARC Logics 17 February 2010
On February 17, 2009, Wolters Kluwer announced the creation of a new business unit, ARC Logics that includes Axentis, Sword and CCH® TeamMate product lines. The new unit will help organizations across multiple industries address increasingly complex audit, risk and compliance challenges. As a combined business unit, ARC Logics is currently serving more than 1,800 customers and over 350,000 users in over 100 countries. The company’s customers span all industries, including: life sciences, healthcare, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, energy and government.
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Sword Butler Technology Audit 29 January 2009
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, is a risk management solution that records risks, controls, and responsibilities throughout an organisation. It provides users with repositories of information about activities and processes within the organisation, the risks associated with them, and the steps that can be taken to mitigate these risks. Many risks are associated with compliance, and organisations often do not understand which regulations they need to comply with or what their duties are in order to comply.
Organisations often use spreadsheets to maintain a list of risks and how they should be addressed, which are error prone and difficult to manage. One of the strengths of Sword is that it can be supplied pre-populated with a range of content, such as risk and control libraries, categories, metrics, and thresholds, targeted at specific vertical industries, functions, and regulations.
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Sword voted top enterprise-wide risk management vendor in 2009 Risk Magazine Technology Rankings January 1st, 2010
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, was again voted top operatonal risk management vendor in the latest Risk Technology Rankings from Risk magazine. Sword topped the poll for Operational risk management – risk control and self assessment, key risk indicators and internal loss management and Operational risk management – capital calculation improving on their 2008 position.
Risk polled thousands of banks, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies and corporate treasurers for this year’s technology rankings, and received 2,437 valid responses. Respondents were asked to vote for the technology vendors that provide the best product offering across a number of categories, including enterprise risk management, risk capital calculation, front- to back-office trading systems, and pricing and analytics.
Participants were asked to base their votes on functionality, usability, performance, return on investment and reliability. Nominated technology companies were awarded three points for a first-choice vote, two for a second- choice vote and one point for a third-choice vote. Only technology end-users were allowed to vote. Risk conducted a comprehensive due diligence process and disqualified any votes that were felt to be unfair.
Download the report from our website
[Back to Top]Managing Emerging Risks January 21st, 2010
Dan Wallace talks about the importance of and methods employed in Managing Emerging Risks in our CCH Sword Blog www.cchsword.com/blog
[Back to Top]The FSA get serious about Stress Testing December 15th, 2009
www.cchsword.com/blog
As part of a recent announcement on the importance of Stress Testing, Paul Sharma, FSA director of prudential policy, said: “Stress and scenario testing should be an important element in firms’ planning and risk management processes. These changes send a clear signal to firms’ senior management that they need to engage in building a robust stress testing infrastructure as an important part of effective risk management, and use that to assess capital needs in a stress.”
This will force financial institutions to use scenarios to model risk and then to stress those scenarios. It also implies that they will need to take a quantitative approach to measuring the risk in scenarios. As if this isn’t enough, the announcement goes on to say that it expects firms to carry out “simultaneous system-wide stress testing”. That means having a common set of scenarios that are assessed across the enterprise and then compared and aggregated.
Right now, the majority of financial insitutions who are doing scenario analysis are using spreadsheets and this is clearly going to have to change. In partnership with some of our clients in insurance who are preparing for Solvency II and the Swiss Solvency Test, we have built a Scenario Analysis module in Sword that supports exactly what the FSA is asking for. Users create a set of scenario templates, determining what information is captured and what measures are required for each scenario. These can then be assigned to each of the relevant parts of the organisation for assessment and their status monitored. Once assessments are complete, the results can be used to analyse and stress the scenarios. Importantly, scenarios can draw on the data in the underlying risk framework, linking risk assessment, mitigation and losses to scenarios automatically, to inform and improve their assessment.
Scenario analysis and stress testing is an important step towards reducing risk in the financial institutions and I believe that, if the FSA supervise this initiative robustly, it will have a very positive effect.
[Back to Top]ISO 31000 - it's in the defintion December 10th, 2009
www.cchsword.com/blog
What is different about ISO31000 is more or less encapsulated in its definition of risk as; “The effect of uncertainty on objectives”. Firstly,risk; ISO31000 is unashamedly risk-based rather than control-based (as, e.g. COSO or COBIT) and this, in turn, makes it an approach rather than a prescription, unlike control-based standards. Secondly, there is ISO31000’s insistence that risk is measured in terms of its effect onobjectives. Why is this important? Because without the need for pages of additional text it reinforces ISO31000 as a corporate governance standard.
If the definition of objectives is correct and complete and the risks to them are understood, effective governance becomes possible. Finally, effect is a neutral term that includes the upside of uncertainty as well as the downside.
It isn’t simply about stopping bad things from happening but implies quantitative measurement of positives and negatives and, hence, risk-based decision making.
The progenitors of ISO31000 have clearly thought hard about the definition of risk and this is one of the reasons why I am happy to join the crowd who are lauding it.
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, is an acknowledged world leader in operat
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Sword is the Enterprise Risk Management tool of choice for many of the world's most renowned blue-ch
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