Stephanie Lennon

It has been a decade since the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision issued standard number 239 (BCBS239), entitled "Principles for Effective Risk Data Aggregation and Risk Reporting" (RDARR or RDAR). BCBS239 was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, which illuminated our collective struggle with aggregating risk exposure and identifying risk concentration across products, customer segments, lines of business, and legal entities in a timely fashion. This timing issue is significant, as sound decision-making hinges on having accurate and current information. BCBS239 was created to guide banks toward better risk management through sound data practices.

I often come back to the analogy that data is like light: You can’t see light directly, but you can see its reflections. Data is remarkably similar.

Banks keep pushing the frontier in leveraging Big Data to drive better decisions. Putting all that information – especially consumer data – to work for your organization doesn’t come without risks. That risk can escalate every time your bank takes its data usage to the next level, making it critical to proactively up your data management game.

We can pretty much agree that information drives business today, and using it strategically raises revenue exponentially.

We’re less than 48 hours into Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, and my household has been glued to the TV, watching the nightmare unfold. During this time, economic sanctions have been enacted, putting intense pressure on the financial system to be able to comply with these new rules. While federally-imposed economic sanctions aren’t new, many banks are scrambling to tighten up AML/KYC routines, at individual, entity, and regional levels.

We can pretty much agree that information drives business today, and using it strategically raises revenue exponentially.

Life’s only constant is change. It’s a tricky word, fraught with implied emotions depending on the catalyst for and expected result – or fallout – from it.

A slender book with an outsized lesson remains my go-to resource in helping organizations manage through change.

In my 30s, I developed a passion for wine.

The Big Picture We remember spending hours (if not days) each month in mind-numbing tedium as junior analysts, producing regular reporting for our business lines. The recurring exercise had us piecing together data from various sources, manually updating Excel files and praying fervently that none of the associated formulas got corrupted along the way. Excel would generate new graphs, which we transferred over to PowerPoint, and, more often than not, further manipulation would be required to fit them into the approved templates to avoid formatting glitches. Copy-Paste was both our dearest friend and greatest foe.