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| How one company uses investigative technology |
| Minimizing technology-related risks |
| Preparing for future risks |
To protect themselves from risk, businesses in a variety of sectors often hire an outside investigative company to take deep dives into their operations and identify potentially costly vulnerabilities. These risks can include data breaches, compliance failures, and falsified or hidden customer information that can expose an organization to fraud.
Though organizations have always had to manage risk, of course, many of the most potentially damaging forms of risk these days are rooted in technology. Cyber-attacks are an obvious example. Another risk that financial services companies in particular need to minimize: customers and vendors who use false identities to engage in illegal activities such as money laundering.
But the good news is that technology also can be leveraged to minimize these risks. Investigative companies can employ multiple systems for due diligence to generate comprehensive and reliable data to start their investigations. They also can access a broad spectrum of data sources to ensure thorough research. Advanced data analytics, AI-powered pattern recognition, and secure communication platforms are among the tools risk managers and investigators are putting to work to protect their organizations from fraud, regulatory noncompliance, and other risks.
How one company uses investigative technology
Here’s an example of an outside company that is successfully using technology to help its clients minimize risk. J2 Risk Advisors is a Minneapolis-based investigations and security company with clients worldwide. Its team includes investigators, protection professionals, fraud examiners, and forensic/technical experts. Its multifaceted practice includes examining potential investments for possible risks and gathering security intel on potential threat actors. Using risk and fraud investigative solutions developed by Thomson Reuters, J2 were able to quickly access hundreds of data sources in real-time, thus ensuring that the information it retrieves is accurate and current.
That abundance of data also can be overwhelming. How can investigators determine which information is truly accurate and up to date? A related challenge: Ascertaining data reliability can be time-consuming, and J2’s clients typically need to uncover potential risks quickly. Then there’s another challenge: In some cases, there isn’t much data available at all, or at least not enough to detect potentially damaging risks.
To manage these and other challenges, J2 has found that using several Thomson Reuters investigative tools has helped it gain a more complete sense of the vulnerabilities its clients need to identify and address—while quickly winnowing out real-time records, documents, and other usable data from irrelevant noise.
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Minimizing technology-related risks
As J2’s use of digital tools demonstrates, organizations seek to integrate new technologies to help them better minimize risk. The advantages that tech tools can confer, however, need to be balanced with an awareness of the challenges.
One of the biggest potential roadblocks is the cost. Organizations will need to determine how the expenses of investigative technology can be balanced by the benefits it can deliver. Proponents can point to the specific types of risk that technology can identify and mitigate, and they should be able to prove that not addressing those risks would be more costly to the organization than the cost of the technology itself.
A related expense is the time needed to train an organization’s in-house risk managers and investigators in the proper use of these new digital tools. If the tools are to deliver the benefits of speed and accuracy that organizations require, its users need to know how to apply them correctly. That mastery may require hours of dedicated work.
And that requirement can lead to yet another challenge: resistance to change. Just about every organization has experienced this, and it’s easy to see why. Executives and staffers alike have worked hard to develop smooth workflows based on their current expertise. Asking them to disrupt those work habits can be a tough sell.
To meet these challenges, risk managers and investigators need to demonstrate clear long-term benefits. Again, investigative technology advocates will need to show that the benefits of minimizing risk outweigh the costs, including the expenses of time and money related to training. One point advocates can make: Out-of-date methods and data can actually incur higher expenses because they end up using more staff time and resources than newer, more accurate tools.
Preparing for future risks
There’s no doubt that the use of digital technology to minimize risk will become even more crucial in the future. That’s primarily for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, more and more of the risks that organizations will need to mitigate will themselves be rooted in the digital world. Fraudsters are mastering sophisticated ways to use deepfakes and falsified data to attack company data, install ransomware, and use financial accounts to launder ill-gotten gains.
For another, digital technology can deliver the speed and accuracy that risk managers and investigators will need to uncover and mitigate risk. Besides identifying potentially fraudulent activity, digital tools can also help organizations stay on top of national and global regulatory changes so that they can remain in compliance with the rules that govern their industry, thus avoiding costly fines and reputational damage.
To gain deeper insight into how investigative technology can help organizations of all kinds to minimize a variety of risks, read how J2 Risk Advisors is successfully incorporating digital solutions by viewing the case study.
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