How to Conduct a Risk Assessment

Why risk assessments are critical to your compliance program success

Risk assessments are systematic evaluations to identify, prioritize and mitigate potential organizational risks. Effective compliance programs rely on thorough risk assessments as their foundation. Regulators and global compliance frameworks stress the importance of ongoing evaluations to identify and address vulnerabilities. Beyond fulfilling these expectations, risk assessments enable organizations to focus limited resources on the most pressing risks, ensuring responses are targeted and meaningful.

Successful risk assessments aren’t one-time tasks

Risk assessments are essential for compliance program success. Mature programs leverage them to identify and mitigate risks proactively to ensure regulatory compliance. But despite their importance, many organizations treat them as one-time tasks, only to set them aside, thus undermining their effectiveness. 

For risk assessments to be truly impactful, they should be a sustainable component of your compliance program. By implementing purpose-built systems and defined processes, you can deliver a risk assessment process that helps you identify and mitigate risk on an ongoing basis, at an operational level.