Organizations face a complex environment of risk, internally and externally. Geopolitical, financial/treasury, economic, operational, legal, and regulatory environments produce compound risks for organizations to manage. Many organizations are learning that these risks often interrelate to create a much larger risk environment than each independent silo is aware of.

Effective governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) delivers the ability to meet requirements, achieve human and financial efficiency, and meet the demands of a dynamic business environment that requires agility. It eliminates silos of risk and compliance that emerge from parts of the organization that have historically worked independently of each other.

No company is an island unto itself: Organizations are a complex and diverse system of processes and business relationships. Risk and compliance challenges do not stop at traditional organizational boundaries. Organizations today struggle to identify, manage, and control governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) across extended business relationships.

Investigations, done right, minimize or control loss, uncover systemic issues, identify risk areas, and provide information that drive continuous improvement initiatives. As a result, investigations are a critical cornerstone to governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC) efforts in the ability to find and resolve issues to reduce exposure and contain loss to the organization.

The old paradigm of regulatory change management is clearly a recipe for disaster given the volume, pace of change and the broader operational impact of today's laws and regulations. Just as the CFO needs a financial system or the sales department needs CRM, legal and compliance need regulatory intelligence.

Most organizations fail to manage the lifecycle of policy, resulting in policies that are out-of-date, ineffective, and not aligned to business needs. It opens the doors of liability, as an organization may be held accountable for policy in place that is not appropriate or properly enforced. Organizations require a consistent process to develop, communicate, monitor, and maintain corporate policy and procedures.

While GRC is ultimately about collaboration and communication between business roles and processes, technology provides the backbone that enables GRC. To describe this technology, Corproate Integrity has defined the GRC Reference Architecture2 (this is closely aligned to the second version of the Open Compliance & Ethics Group (OCEG) GRC Technology Blueprint).

Corporate and regulatory compliance policies have forced companies to ensure that information flows are documented, auditable, and highly secure. Yet in order to conduct their business, companies must share sensitive information outside the firewall, introducing serious potential information risk.

Heightened merchant concerns over securing sensitive cardholder information, as well as new Payment Card Industry (PCI) security mandates, have driven demand for integrated card data protection solutions. These concerns are well justified.

Fraud in the insurance industry is nothing new; however, the growth of both telephone and Web-based sales channels provides fraudsters with greater opportunity to take advantage of insurance companies.

Many organisations' governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) practices have not changed for years. The result is organisations are struggling to keep up with the complex regulatory environment and meet external stakeholders' expectations. Many organisations, no matter what sector they trade in are seeking to become more flexible and profitable while increasing internal controls and reducing risk. These objectives appear to be contradictory, but one way large organisations can unite them is by improving their approach to GRC.

For businesses that accept recurring payments, customer relationships last well beyond a single transaction. For these merchants and billers, it's critical to utilize payment tools that can minimize billing disruptions and maintain service continuity. This can reduce processing costs, maximize revenues, and strengthen customer satisfaction.

Managing payment security is an ongoing challenge for organizations. To help businesses understand management trends and practices among peer groups, CyberSource and Trustwave, in partnership with the Merchant Risk Council (MRC), commissioned the Payment Security Practices and Trends Survey. The report summarizes the findings and provides insights and industry benchmarks, as well as industry trends.