Risk and compliance experts occupy a niche industry. They have specialized knowledge and experience, and this knowledge is highly valued in the financial services industry. However, there is a major change coming in risk and compliance. Both have largely been handled manually be experts in smaller organizations. Your risk and compliance experts would be the framework that would help the organization ensure compliance while lowering risks. Automation, however, has changed the equation by taking over much of the work that risk and compliance experts did.
This leaves us in the current situation – where many risk and compliance experts are questioning their role in the organization as more and more risk and compliance processes become completely automated. The changes that affect this niche sector is of interest to people working in any industry or sector as automation will end up reaching every industry and every type of job. The risk and compliance domains thus provide a great chance to see how automation changes job roles.
Risk and Compliance Experts Are Not Going Anywhere
The biggest anxiety that most people have is that they will lose their jobs to automation. Now, there is some truth to this statement, as many people have lost their jobs to automation and many more will lose their jobs to automation in the coming decade. However, things work different when it comes to domains like risk and compliance. What is important to understand is that risk and compliance work can be divided into two types of work – administrative work and strategic work.
The administrative work is currently what risk and compliance experts spend most of their time doing. This includes activities like keeping track of risk metrics and compliance issues, ensuring that all activities are being completed on time, creating reports, getting everyone else to fulfill questionnaires, and so on. A lot of these activities will be completely automated in the coming few years. Now, this raises the question – if most of the activities that risk and compliance experts are responsible for are automated, then why will an organization need risk and compliance experts?
The answer to that question is simple – there are many other things that risk and compliance experts can do for their organizations.
Technology Will Increase the Importance of Risk and Compliance Experts
As we said before, risk and compliance work can be divided into administrative and strategic work. Most administrative tasks will be completely automated, but the strategic work is a whole different ballgame. See, risk and compliance also require a strategy based on corporate goals. That work will be done by humans for a long time because it is based on human preferences. Risk and compliance experts are currently mid-level employees because they mostly engage in administrative work. When the administrative work is completely automated it will give risk and compliance experts free time to work on bigger projects.
Instead of simply creating documents and spreadsheets, risk and compliance experts will be able to look at the overall corporate strategy and look for improvements. They will be able to recommend strategies that can help businesses cut costs and become more agile. All this will be easier to accomplish because so much of the administrative work will be completely automated. This means that risk and compliance experts will be free from menial work and will instead be able to apply the full scope of their expertise and experience to help organizations perform better.
This is also why businesses that have automated risk and compliance tend to rely so much on the advice of risk and compliance experts. Risk and compliance automation technologies deliver thousands of new metrics and data points that can help banks gain insights about their risk and compliance shortcomings. There is a lot of intelligence embedded in the data that is being generated within the organization. Once the risk and compliance experts start analyzing the data and delivering new insights, the organization gains a better understanding of what it needs to do.
Risk and compliance experts of the future will be more satisfied with their jobs because they will have to partake in fewer menial tasks and will instead be able to focus on helping the business achieve their corporate goals. This is important because it changes risk and compliance domains from being cost drivers to being value generators. Businesses will realize that their risk and compliance teams are not an expense – they are an investment that can help the business do more with fewer resources.
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