Risk Assessment

In the business world, risk comes with the territory. Whether you’re considering partnerships or new suppliers, hiring staff, facing tough competitors, expanding into other markets or countries, launching a new product or investing in the latest technologies, a certain degree of risk is unavoidable.

That’s why risk assessment is key to a robust business strategy. Risk assessment is a process of gauging potential hazards for your business activities and determining the possible consequences should those hazards occur. In other words, it’s about looking at what can go wrong before it goes wrong so you can best prepare for and try to mitigate the danger to your organisation.

Companies use risk assessment as part of an overall risk-management scheme to reduce business risks, develop contingency plans for facing risks directly and establish disaster-recovery plans if the need arises.

Risk-mitigation process

Following risk assessment, it’s important for companies to have a risk-mitigation process in place. Risk mitigation, another component of risk management, is not about avoiding risk altogether – again, in business, a certain amount of risk is inevitable. Instead, risk mitigation is a preventative strategy for preparing for all potential risks and reducing the impact of these threats.

To lessen adverse effects to your organisation, a good risk-mitigation process typically involves screening and evaluating each threat, performing due diligence and necessary investigations, and ongoing monitoring of prospective dangers.

Nexis Diligence+™

• current and archival news dating back 40 years
• sanctions lists, watchlists and lists of politically exposed persons (PEPs)
• executive, company and industry data
• in-depth risk analysis reports

Plus, you can use the tool’s integrated Report Builder to maintain verifiable due diligence audit trails, complete with time and date stamps, to help satisfy regulatory expectations.

With Nexis Diligence+™, you can

• better understand your customers, employees and vendors to stay on top of risks that could disrupt your business
• boost productivity
• increase profitability
• inform and improve your decision-making

Nexis^® Entity Insight

Nexis^® Entity Insight is a supply-chain risk-management solution that provides more transparency to your business risk and arms you with the information you need to proactively make decisions before problems arise. The tool helps you manage risk by conducting global adverse media monitoring and capturing actionable business intelligence on your supply chain and third-party network so you can make better informed, smarter decisions.

Entity Insight uses a PESTLE (political, economic, sociocultural, technological, legal and environmental) scoring framework that supports your company’s risk-based approach and helps you more quickly identify supply chain and third-party risk. It aggregates market intelligence and premium news sources that you typically can’t access on the open web, providing you with a more complete view.

Entity Insight’s easy-to-use risk-management dashboard allows you to quickly:

• review a snapshot of risk levels and trending risk areas, and then drill down for specific risk profiles
• manage active and pending entities, as well as the related RSS feeds (you can view these RSS feeds individually or integrate them with key business systems, enabling you to read adverse news associated with each feed in real time)
• visualise news volume for all active entity mentions, colour-coded by PESTLE category
• identify the top 10 news volume trends among active entities and risk topics
• explore the context of adverse media mentions and mitigate emerging risks

Diligence spotter^®

LexisNexis Diligence spotter^® is a dynamic case management, screening and risk assessment workflow solution. This software automates the process of screening and risk assessment, allowing for ad-hoc and batch screening and monitoring of global watchlists, PEPs and news content.

With Diligence spotter®, you can:

• strengthen your risk-assessment process by managing cases, screening third parties, setting risk profiles and assessing risk
• increase your case-management efficiency
• proactively manage your know-your-customer (KYC) risk processes to safeguard against financial, regulatory and reputational damage resulting from corruption
• efficiently and cost-effectively meet ever-evolving regulatory expectations and global standards with confidence

Ultimately, with LexisNexis’ comprehensive risk-assessment and risk-management solutions, you can properly arm your business operations against the unwelcome threats inherent in today’s global marketplace. With these tools in place and on the case, you can focus on what’s important – growing your company!