Leveraging customer-proven technology, the latest version of its flagship product, RiskResolve delivers significant new functionality that helps financial firms to improve their risk management practices, enabling them to more accurately identify and measure the impact of risks and losses thereby strengthening overall financial performance.

Financial firms globally are focused on a broad range of compliance mandates, most notably Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, which continue to evolve. In 2005, institutions are expected to incur operational losses totaling nearly $30 billion worldwide. With most institutions now comfortable with their calibrations of operational capital, there remains a challenge for those firms seeking to improve their control environment, business processes and loss mitigation efforts. Providus’ RiskResolve 4.0 fills this active risk management void.

RiskResolve 4.0 is the only ORM and compliance solution that tightly integrates two key components of operational risk management: Control Self-Assessment, and Loss and Event Assessment. By merging managements’ efforts to mitigate risk with the institution's loss experience, RiskResolve sharpens an institution's ability to affirmatively influence their operational risk management efforts to lessen the severity and frequency of losses.

By combining these capabilities, a closed-loop system is created enabling management to continually enhance the accuracy of risk predictions, monitor risk management activities of the business units and proactively manage the effectiveness of the internal controls. Managers can evaluate their performance, learn from their loss experiences and improve their ability to predict and manage risk. Over time, financial firms can reduce operational losses and redirect risk capital, while improving corporate governance and market risk ratings.

"New operational risk requirements of Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley are mandating that firms prescribe directives to cut down on operational losses, underscoring further the need to merge the functions of compliance and risk management at the enterprise level," said Virginia Garcia, senior analyst in the Financial Services Strategies & IT Investments research service at TowerGroup. "Providus is working with financial institutions to provide a horizontal reach of operational risk management enabling these firms to combine the immediate tactical results of compliance with the long-term strategic value of effective risk management that links to business improvement and competitive advantage."

CALYON in the Americas, the regional component of CALYON, a global corporate and investment bank with assets of approximately $380 billion and a wholly owned subsidiary of Crédit Agricole, plans to deploy RiskResolve 4.0 to 70 senior managers for controlled risk mitigation throughout the organization. "RiskResolve provides us with an opportunity to radically change the way we manage and control operational risk," said Bob Angarola, managing director and chief internal control officer for CALYON Americas. "Its loss data reporting capabilities, which we didn’t find among any of the other products we reviewed, will allow us to improve our ability to identify and control risks. As a result, we can play a more active role in risk prevention. This will also help position us for our Basel II reporting in the coming years."

This powerful ORM solution provides an intuitive Web-based interface and detailed reporting capabilities that address the needs of diverse users: from executive officers responsible for ensuring compliance and institutional success, to line of business managers who are accountable for implementing best practices for risk management, to oversight groups who must test and certify the control environment.

Designed to support the most complex financial firms, RiskResolve 4.0 can help companies:

Reduce operational losses through a closed-loop system that enables managers to learn from their mistakes by evaluating risk assertions against actual outcomes. RiskResolve creates an adaptive risk management environment that aligns with the strategic goals of the organization.

Strengthen financial performance through the ability to proactively prevent risks by responding to RiskResolve’s real-time feedback and insight about a potential risk, the weakness of a control and the impact of a loss event; firms will benefit from a risk-informed culture that promotes awareness and accountability.

Address and consolidate multiple and evolving compliance mandates that exist now or may exist in the future through an open, standards-based solution. RiskResolve provides a flexible and sustainable framework that leverages existing systems and extracts data where ever it resides (i.e. Fraud detection and case management systems among others).
"Regulatory compliance and risk management practices are converging," said Andrew T. Evans, president and CEO of Providus. "RiskResolve addresses this trend by offering the industry’s only solution that links qualitative assertions with quantitative events, providing customers with the unique opportunity to make more accurate risk assertions. Our customers will benefit from a reduction in the frequency and severity of operational losses; improved operational efficiencies and financial performance; in addition to direct control over costly capital calculations."

RiskResolve offers a proven approach to operational risk management called Active Risk Management™, which delivers a systematic yet highly customizable framework for documenting, mitigating and proactively controlling risks and therefore the losses that can occur. RiskResolve's unique approach offers real-time visibility and insight into an organization's risk exposures and control environments, allowing users the ability to take preventative action against a potential loss. Offering built-in support for Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, FDICIA, GLBA, COBiT and other compliance initiatives, RiskResolve reduces redundancies across organizations and minimizes the cost of conformance.