Some great news from the analyst front!  In the recently released Forrester Wave for Enterprise GRC Platforms, OpenPages was named Top Ranked Current Offering!

Chosen from a field of 14 enterprise GRC platform vendors using 80 criteria, this is a significant endorsement and a testament to the active OpenPages community that has helped shape our product direction. Forrester analysts gave OpenPages top marks for its comprehensive and clear company strategy and vision, and were particularly impressed with the progress OpenPages has made over the past 12 months. The analysts noted that OpenPages made “some of the most significant strides in the overall functionality of its GRC platform, which earned strong scores in all areas evaluated.”

OpenPages would like to thank all that have contributed to the OpenPages community and helped deliver the industry’s top ranked Enterprise GRC Platform.

Click here to download the report.

President Obama announced his long-awaited proposals for the overhaul of the regulatory system for the financial services sector.   There were no real surprises as the administration has been seeking input from many different parties for months and surrogates have be floating specific proposals over the last couple weeks.  The so-called White Paper (www.financialstability.org) that outlines the administration’s thinking is pretty stark in places: “it is clear now that the government could have done more to prevent many of these problems from growing out of control and threatening the stability of our financial system.” (Page 2). 

It’s clear that the main thrust of the regulatory reform is around systemic risk and consumer protection.  Addressing the systemic risk issue, the Administration is proposing a Financial Services Oversight Council.  What’s interesting here is that they scrapped the alternative of consolidating such power in a single agency, e.g. the Federal Reserve.  Other proposals to address systemic risk include the creation of a category called Tier 1 FHC which the Fed will oversee, a revision of capital requirements for Tier 1 FHCs, a new Federal Bank Supervisor to conduct prudential supervision of other banks, the regulation of investment banks by the Fed, and other proposals.  On consumer protection, the Administration is proposing a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. 

What is utterly lacking in these proposals is any sort of programmatic approach to intra-company risk management.  There’s a brief mention of this issue:

“Prudential standards for Tier 1 FHCs—including capital, liquidity, and risk management standards—should be stricter and more conservative than those applicable to other financial firms to account for the greater risks that their potential failure would impose on the financial systems.” 

How companies will react to these “stricter standards” remains to be seen.  But as taxpayers holding a large stake in several of these Tier 1 FHCs, we should all want greater transparency into the control environment, decision-making process around risk management issues, and the organizational structure around risk management. These proposals do not address those issues. 

This week OpenPages is sponsoring the RMA Operational Risk Management Discussion Group being held at The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The two-day forum was kicked-off by Victoria Garrity, Senior Quantitative Analyst from the Boston Federal Reserve. Victoria’s session titled “Regulatory Perspective on Scenarios: Challenges and Issues”, was well attended and sparked a number of conversations on potential forthcoming regulations. Other interesting sessions included a discussion moderated by Michael Fenn of DTCC and Patrick McDermott of Freddie Mac on the evolution of ORM assessments, and a roundtable facilitated by Kathy Miller of KeyCorp on “Recent Experiences with Regulators” in which the discussion focused on operational risk examinations and emerging guidance from the regulatory environment.

Overall a very timely and thought-provoking forum attended by some of the leading operational risk practitioners.