Unquantifiable benefits of a good risk assessment tool

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Corporate executives focus on metrics. And that makes perfect sense. Metrics provide hard numbers about how well various aspects of a business’s operations are performing. They can also help determine whether certain initiatives or tools they’ve put in place are meeting company goals

But not all payoffs of an operational tool or initiative lend themselves to strict measurement. Here’s a case in point. A Forrester Research study commissioned by Thomson Reuters found that users of the company’s  ID Confirm and Risk Inform risk assessment tools reported numerous quantifiable benefits. At the same time, the users surveyed in the report identified several benefits that can’t be reduced to data points yet have still provided significant value to their company.

Here are some of the more notable ways users say that CLEAR’s capabilities have their organization’s ongoing success:

1. Flexibility of use

Users of the CLEAR suite noted in the Forrester report that they can run the software through a web browser, an application programming interface (API), or a batch service. For this benefit, users said that this flexibility has allowed them to choose the delivery mode or modes that make the most sense for their organization and for their specific use cases.

This, in turn, has made it much easier to manage the tasks they had to accomplish. The web browser option, for instance, makes the program easy to use right out of the gate. Those selecting CLEAR’s API option found that this made their day-to-day due diligence efforts more efficient. And the batch service option helped one customer get through a massive backlog of due diligence work and better fulfill that customer’s crucial role in the company.

2. More efficient customer onboarding

Potential customers of financial institutions don’t like to wait for approval. To be sure, banks need to protect themselves from money launderers and fraudsters by conducting thorough due diligence. But if a bank can’t verify the applicant’s identity and background quickly, that prospective customer may go elsewhere.

Users of the CLEAR platform, according to the Forrester report, stated they’ve been able to make informed onboarding decisions faster and win additional business they might otherwise have lost. That’s because CLEAR allows them to streamline due diligence procedures and thus avoid potential delays in processing and approving customers. In some cases, same-day service made the difference between gaining a valuable source of business and watching that customer open an account with a competitor: a clear benefit of using the CLEAR platform for risk assessment.

3. Improved customer experience

Measuring “customer experience” is difficult. Though a company can identify such factors as repeat business and time spent on a website, other factors are less reducible to numbers. People are simply too complex and diverse. They respond to interaction with a business in innumerable ways.

Customer experience is a reflection of how well the various parts of an organization work together. CLEAR users surveyed in the Forrester report said that their customers valued the efficiency of their approval and onboarding process and that faster approvals improved the overall customer experience and benefit.

4. Improved employee experience

Like customer experience, measuring employee satisfaction is complicated. But it’s essential, because high satisfaction helps boost talent retention, lowers staff turnover, and reduces the overall costs incurred in hiring and training new employees. But what happens when the customer onboarding processes that risk assessment employees have to use are time-consuming, frustrating, and tedious? The result is often loss of morale, burnout, and reduced productivity.

The CLEAR customers interviewed in the Forrester report found that after the platform was implemented, their employees enjoyed their daily work much more. “The satisfaction among employees is high,” said one respondent, because the information presented in CLEAR is easy to interpret and use. This is a significant benefit for both the employees and the organization.

5. Future platform flexibility

Another benefit that is hard to measure but important to consider is the peace of mind that comes from knowing that a tool bought today is flexible and scalable enough to adapt to the organization’s needs as it grows. According to the Forrester report, CLEAR customers liked the fact that their current use of ID Confirm and Risk Inform would make it easier to implement additional products from the CLEAR suite as their business needs evolved, streamlining the framework of risk management.

For example, after using CLEAR to prevent fraud at the front end of the onboarding process, organizations can tap other CLEAR capabilities to help them investigate fraud after it has occurred–and thus prevent similar types of fraud from happening in the future. CLEAR customers told Forrester that their familiarity with the program could also help them deploy new capabilities very quickly, as they’re needed. This enhances the larger platform’s overall appeal.

Again, benefits like these may not lend themselves to specific metrics. But they do demonstrate that the value and utility of Thomson Reuters CLEAR risk assessment solutions extend beyond the platform itself. CLEAR users report that both their customers and their employees are happier while allowing their businesses to better protect themselves from the risk of fraud. And both capabilities can help organizations continue to prosper.