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In furtherance of it’s leadership role, the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) has taken a bold step to develop a new industry technology platform that provide enabling environment to effectively manage risks, enhance efficiency and achieve business objectives, thereby significantly reducing the cost of regtech.
This was disclosed on Tuesday by the CEO of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, Oscar Onyema at the Digital Transformation of Governance, Risk Management and Compliance functions webinar and official launch of the SentryGRC (www.sentrygrc.com) platform.
He stated that the platform is part of the NSE’s contribution for building the required infrastructure and platform for the Nigeria Capital Market to leverage to achieve strategic business objectives.
The virtual event which was moderated by Benson Uwheru (Partner & Financial Services Risk Management Leader, WA, Ernst & Young) had distinguished panellists that comprised of: Magnus Nnoka (Chief Risk Officer, Coronation Merchant Bank and President, Risk Management Association of Nigeria), Edidiong Akan (Chief Compliance Officer, Stanbic IBTC Pension Managers), Olayinka Odutola (Director General, Association of Enterprise Risk Management Professionals of Nigeria), Tinuade Awe (Executive Director, Regulation NSE) and John Adelana (Head, Regulatory Technology, NSE).
In his opening remarks, Mr. Onyema said organizations are faced with myriads of issues ranging from ever changing and unpredictability of regulations, stakeholders demands for high level of performance and transparency to exponential growth of third party relationship; with associated huge costs of addressing the inherent risks.
He described GRC (Governance, Risk management and Compliance) as an integrated collection of capabilities that enable an organization to largely achieve objectives, address uncertainty and act with integrity.
While highlighting some of the key initiatives by the NSE in positioning the market as a credible platform not just for raising capital but enhance innovation, Onyema said the SentryGRC automates back office functions like Governance, Risk Management and Compliance, and enables organizations to pursue a systematic and organized approach to managing GRC-related strategy and implementation, thereby creating an enabling environment for increasing efficiency and effectiveness alongside reducing cost.
Onyema further said, “To address these issues, organizations develop functions and programmes such as performance management, risk management, Compliance and Corporate social responsibility. Unfortunately, these functions and programmes are also lopsided, ineffective and yield troubling drawbacks due to high costs, lack of visibility into risks, inability to address third party risks, difficulty measuring risks adjusted performance and too many negative surprises”.
“When these activities are in silos, it is highly likely that counter-productive objectives are established, sub-optimal strategies are selected and performance not optimized. With Sentry GRC, instead of keeping the organization’s activities in separate silos, the administrator can use a single framework to monitor compliance and enforce rules and procedures”, said the NSE boss.
While commenting on the features, Onyema stated that SentryGRC has robust features which are important to many organizations spanning Corporate governance, risk management, compliance, audit management, IT audit, internal control, business continuity, legal work flows, data protection regulation and ethics management.
He also stated that SentryGRC can be implemented by any organization – public or private, large or small that wants to effectively align her activities with business goals, manage risks effectively and stay on top of compliance.
Onyema used the opportunity to invite represented participants to join the NSE in embracing SentryGRC and adopt the new platform.
The event ended with a digital closing gong ceremony.
© Regtech Africa 2020
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