Using insights from time spent on the ground with businesses in a variety of sectors, Gaurav Kapoor, Office of the CEO and COO atMetricStream, explores five universal GRC trends

Over the past year, executives at large and small companies across a variety of industries have experienced fresh GRC challenges, bringing with them new risks and opportunities. What’s evident is that while each organisation is different – in terms of its culture, or speed of reaction to risk, or even digital maturity –there are several trends that remain consistent across all.

Disruption as the only constant 

Disruption is one of the largest and often most under-represented risks that organisations face today. Banks, insurance firms, life sciences businesses, transportation companies, and even university admission processes, are all being disrupted at multiple levels.

Many are trying to predict and mitigate the risk of disruption ahead of time. A leading airline company, for instance, has created a risk-weighted customer experience where it aggregates and consolidates all its customer, operational, quality, and system related issues, and then aligns this data with its material and emerging risks. In doing so, the airline is able to proactively identify and address potential risk patterns, lapses, or gaps in customer experience that could be leveraged by the competition to disrupt the market.

Other firms are strengthening their preparedness to deal with both known and unknown disruptions. For example, in the national railway industry, a large provider is responding to potential market changes by prioritising risk events related not just to internal operations, but also to customers, the economy, and the entire national logistics infrastructure. This…