How to Adapt to a Changing World Using Situational Awareness

As COVID-19 continues to impact our global economy, financial institutions are under increasing pressure to service unprecedented demand from their business customers. Situational awareness empowers you to overcome new challenges, protect your organization against emerging threats, and seize new opportunities.

It is critical to understand the changes to your commercial customers during this time, and you can achieve this by leveraging data to create customer context. With situational awareness, you can use this context to automate processes and enable faster, more accurate decision-making

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Where is COVID-19 creating the biggest challenges?

Several business processes throughout the customer lifecycle are being heavily impacted by the global pandemic. From a stretched workforce to increased risk, these areas face a multitude of short-term and long-term challenges that financial institutions must overcome. These areas include:

• Credit risk – There has been a dramatic increase in loan origination activities, which all require careful assessment for exposure to high-risk sectors or geographies through supply chains. Financial institutions will also need to continue monitoring lending portfolios to identify early signs of credit deterioration.
• Fraud detection and prevention – As credit and loan requests increase, so does the risk of first party fraud. As COVID-19 continues to restrict face-to-face interactions, financial institutions are facing additional fraud risk.
• KYC and AML – In addition to financial crime being on the rise, changes in normal behaviors will likely cause a huge backlog of false positive AML alerts. Outdated KYC checks and rapidly changing circumstances are also putting financial institutions at significant risk.
• Customer intelligence – With the increasing risk of customer churn, financial institutions need to be ahead of the game when the market does resurge to acquire new customers in the future and overcome significant time pressures on relationship managers.

Future-proof your organization with situational awareness

To gain a complete understanding of your commercial customers, financial institutions must first create a single view that brings together internal and external data sources to provide enriched intelligence. By joining the dots in this data, you can build customer context to reveal hidden behaviors and relationships and allow you to see the complete picture of your commercial customers and their counterparties. This will empower you to more accurately identify risk and make better decisions, despite drastic changes.

A single view of data will also empower you to support the multiple business lines involved through a customer lifecycle, from onboarding to credit checks. With a dynamic contextual approach, operational staff will also benefit from a continuous view of all aspects of commercial customers. This approach not only helps to protect your organization and improve business operations, but it also provides a better customer experience.

Agility is fundamental for organizations to react and adapt effectively to new threats and opportunities. By adopting a contextual approach to decision making, you can gain situational awareness and become more resilient against both the short-term and long-term challenges of our changing world.

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Find out what steps you need to take towards achieving situational awareness to gain a better understanding of your commercial customers, protect your financial institution, and overcome COVID-19 challenges.

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