Strunk

Are you tired of doing Risk Assessments?

February 17, 2021/in Banks, Compliance, Credit Unions, Financial Services, Markets, Risk Manager/by Mike Sobba

We hear comments from community bankers across the country that they don’t like doing risk assessments and that they are time consuming. Risk Assessments generally come in the form of Excel Spreadsheets or Word documents. Often times they are done in silos where each functional area of the bank does their regulatory required risk assessment and periodically reports them to the bank’s board for review/approval.

Many banks do risk assessments for the regulators which is typically the wrong approach, in Strunk’s opinion. Risk assessments are done annually for those required by regulations and sometimes others are done two weeks before the regulators walk in. Risk Assessments should be designed to give senior management, board and ownership a snapshot of what risks your bank faces and what has been done to mitigate those risks. High risks aren’t bad; they just need to be managed.

Regulatory scrutiny of BSA/AML, ACH, Fair Lending, Loan Concentrations, Cybersecurity, Information Technology and other areas of the bank have caused financial institutions to spend more time and money focusing on the risks the bank faces. Outsourcing some of these functions to vendors is an expensive way to manage the risk assessment process and certainly unnecessary. Strunk’s GRC (Governance, Risk Management and Compliance) solution makes the risk assessment process easy to do and it consolidates all areas of risk the bank faces into one report.

Bank examiners often tell the community bank that they are coming out for the annual exam six weeks to two months prior to actually showing up. Generally, they ask the bank to send an extensive amount of information prior to coming onsite. This gives the regulator time to form their opinion on what risks the bank faces before arriving at the bank.

Strunk’s solution lets the bank tell their story rather than have the regulator tell the bank’s story to them. Comprehensive risk assessments are made easy with Strunk’s Risk Assessor Solution https://strunkaccess.com/risk-assessor/.

New Look & Feel: ODP Manager v2

February 3, 2021/in Banks, Credit Unions, Financial Services, Markets, Overdraft Privilege/by Kristi Daly

This month’s Strunk Access release introduces an all new look and feel for current ODP Manager clients. In an effort to continuously utilize the latest technology, Strunk stays on top of monthly updates that not only improve feature functionality but also application performance.

ODP Manager v2 consolidates Collection Letters, Custom Letters, and Ad Hoc Form Letters into a single menu option. When users click on Letters in the purple menu bar, they will now select either Collection Letters, Custom Letters, or Ad Hoc Form Letters from the menu. It is easier than ever before to generate letters once the proper menu item is chosen. Clients can also print a sample letter from the generation screen as needed.

These letter types can be used when creating templates to organize the different kinds of letters a client uses. Type Collection should be used for standard collection letters, type Custom will be chosen for all types of consumer communications and type Ad Hoc Form for letter types that need to be sent on demand.

Strunk CEO Dan Roderick says “I want clients to be able to stay on top of their programs and focus on what’s important to their organization. Strunk is committed to ensuring our applications are easy-to-use and continuously updated, to take that additional burden off their shoulders.”

ODP Manager is the most powerful tool available to help financial institutions get the most benefit out of their overdraft programs and remain in full compliance with the law. The application is provided as a cloud-hosted application, taking full advantage of the latest software developments and eliminating the need for users to maintain a separate application in their own network environment.

5 Things you should do to build an Effective Vendor Management Structure

January 27, 2021/in Markets, Sales, Vendor Manager/by Joel Lawrence

Managing your vendor manager program can be troubling and time consuming. With the increase numbers of vendors that companies are depending on each year, companies need to make sure they are monitoring vendors and contracts more efficiency to help prevent problems before they start.

1. Identify your vendors and understand what services that they are providing you.
Creating a list of your existing vendors and understanding the nature of their service is key in your vendor manager structure. Being able to have access to your vendors list and their information will lead to both effectiveness and efficiency inside of your organization. Effective vendor management entails a detailed grouping of vendors based on criticality and service.

2. Contract Review
Storing your vendor contract in a central location will provide insights into the current stage of the vendor, for example, vendors with contract in place, vendors that require renewals, etc.. Having a centralized view of the current status of all contracts will help achieve better decision-making capabilities and save valuable time. Understanding and scoring what provisions should be in the contract will help provide the correct terms of the contract between you and the vendor.

3. Risk Assessment
Completing a risk assessment on your vendors to better understand the risks posed by its third-party relationship is critical to each vendor relationship. Identify any risks that the vendor poses with help your company evaluate whether the vendor can eliminate those risks or determine whether your company can accept those outstanding risks for that vendor.

4. Vendor Reviews
Not all vendors may perform as per your standards. It is important to choose the right vendor from multiple vendors, who meet your organizational standards and criteria while promising excellent performance. Performing periodic vendor reviews will give you a better understanding of the vendor’s performance and make sure they are providing quality product or service to your company.

5. Document Storage
As your company grows, it becomes essential to have a vendor data storage solution in place. In the absence of a vendor management system, storing and retrieving data might prove to be really tough, considering the fact that you may be dealing with multiple vendors for multiple projects at the same time. Having a centralized repository for your vendors data will help streamline and organize your vendor manager program.

Who Handles your Vendor Management?

January 20, 2021/in Markets, Risk Manager, Vendor Manager/by Mike Sobba

Managing the vendors your financial institution does business with is important but it can be time consuming and a stressful project. Some institutions have decided to let third parties manage the risk assessment and vendor due diligence process rather than do it on their own. Strunk’s Vendor Manager solution makes it easy to do risk assessments, manage contracts and other vendor documents and to obtain necessary annual information to ensure risks associated with vendors you do business with is managed appropriately.

Our program provides: 1) A repository of information on each vendor you do business with and 2) The ability to do consistent risk assessments for each vendor. Maintaining a list of key vendor relationships, contracts, insurance certificates, security policies, and other documentation is critical to vendor management. The tickler system notifies the individual assigned to the vendor when contracts come up for renewal or when other documents are due.

Vendor risk assessments can be a hassle and our solution takes a standard approach to ensure the process is consistent and thorough based on the risk (critical, high, moderate or low) per regulatory guidelines. For critical and high risk vendors additional information is obtained from those vendors to complete the risk assessment.

Vendor Management is imperative at all financial institutions and Strunk’s Vendor Manager Solution may be just what you are looking for. Take back the process from outside vendors or make internal vendor due diligence easy and consistent to manage.

Help Your Customers Opt In for Regulation E Online

January 13, 2021/in Banks, Compliance, Credit Unions, Financial Services, Markets, Overdraft Privilege, Tips/by Melissa Newbury

ODP Manager includes letter templates that allow your customers the opportunity to opt in for Regulation E so they can authorize Overdraft Privilege service for ATM withdrawals and everyday debit card purchases. Did you know that ODP Manager can also help you offer your customers the option to opt in on your website?

Strunk can create a Reg E opt in form and Reg E opt out form that mirrors the content in your ODP Manager letters. You would then add links to these forms to your website.

When your customer submits the Consent Form for Overdraft Services or the Consent to Opt-Out, the opt in or opt out request is tracked in ODP Manager. The customer also is emailed a confirmation of their Reg E submission. Periodically, you review the new customer responses in ODP Manager and generate a list of the accounts that need the Reg E election updated. You perform the appropriate maintenance in your core software – updating the account record to either opt in or opt out the customer’s requested account. The ODP Manager software always shows you the most recent responses that you have not yet reviewed. The list of submissions is retained so you can look up past responses.

Let ODP Manager expand your options to allow your customers to choose Overdraft Privilege coverage for ATM and everyday debit card transactions. Please contact Strunk Support at support@strunkaccess.com with any questions or to find out more about using this feature.

Managing your Vendor’s Service Level Agreements

January 6, 2021/in Financial Services, Markets, Vendor Manager/by Joel Lawrence

Vendor Manager automates vendor due diligence, provides a practical framework for deciding which vendors to assess in depth, assesses the risks they present, and monitors their performance.

Defining and managing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with your vendors is a very important aspect of your Vendor Manger program. An SLA defines the level of service expected by you from a vendor, laying out the metrics by which that service is measured, and the remedies or penalties, if any, should the agreed-on service levels not be achieved. Monitoring SLA takes place after the contractual agreement to meet the client expectations is executed. Having a central location to clearly identify, define and review your SLA is critical to your Vendor Manager program.

Being able to create reports to understand where potential problem areas with your vendor’s service that they are providing is key to a quality vendor manger program. Strunk’s Vendor Manager software has the capabilities to help you manage your vendor’s SLAs and it provides a central repository to track your vendor’s performance to make sure they are meeting your business needs.

Use Strunk’s Vendor Manager to automate a cumbersome process into a well-organized, self-documenting work flow. In addition to tracking the performance against key SLAs, use Vendor Manager to maintain your list of key vendors and associated contracts, to assess the inherent risk presented by each vendor and to complete the annual review of each relationship.

Ensuring Employee Compliance With Policies and Procedures

December 16, 2020/in Banks, Compliance, Credit Unions, Financial Services, Markets, Policy Manager/by Mike Sobba

Does your financial institution do annual employee reviews of compliance with your policies and procedures? If not you should. Training employees on specific areas of the bank is crucial to running a successful company and testing for product knowledge is critical to customer service.

All financial institutions have policies that are board approved on an annual basis and a set of procedures that are senior management approved. The question is do your employees know what the policies and procedure say and do they follow them?

In the middle of the 1980’s, the bank I worked at had a product knowledge contest with the winner receiving a trip to Las Vegas. There were three person teams and the questions came from all areas of the bank. So it was important to have a lending person, a retail person and an operations person on each team to have the correct answers. Needless to say, our team won.

Today, we don’t have product or policy knowledge contests but that doesn’t mean you can’t test your employees for knowledge of these. Strunk’s Skills Manager solution allows financial institutions to train your employees on products, procedures or policies. Then through the solution you can test their knowledge based on the training. Test results for each employee funnel up to one person responsible for the training. Many institutions use this for their security or ethics policy requiring their employees to take a test on an annual basis. Could Skills Manager help your financial institution?

Charge Off Items and Recoveries

December 9, 2020/in Banks, Credit Unions, Financial Services, Markets, Overdraft Privilege, Tips/by Melissa Newbury

ODP Manager includes the letters that you need to notify customers that their account has been closed and charged off due to unpaid and outstanding overdrafts or due to a default on a Fresh Start Loan for outstanding overdrafts. Did you know that with Strunk’s most recent software releases, ODP Manager now includes tools that may help you manage your charge off and recovery process after the account has been closed?

At the account level, you can create a charge off item to track the charged off principal and fees. Users are able to add relevant notes and any updates will be logged. As recoveries are made, the recovery can be entered in ODP Manager and will reduce the overall balance tracked.

By default, users will view the Charge Off Items for the last year. If needed, users can select a different timeframe by specifying a start date and an end date. For reporting purposes, the summary of the Charge Off Items can be exported as a PDF.

Please contact Strunk Support at support@strunkaccess.com with any questions or to find out more about using this feature.

How do you Store Essential Vendor Documents

December 2, 2020/in Markets, Sales, Vendor Manager/by Joel Lawrence

In today’s environment it is crucial to understand how you are managing your vendor documents. It is important to know when a vendor needs to send you data or if you are missing documents and also where the documents are located. Having a centralized repository for your vendor documents will help you become more efficient, organized and increase organizational transparency.

Having the documents that belong to your vendors in one location opens the door for better communication and collaboration. Linking all of your vendor documents to a central repository that features automatic notifications and reminders helps you achieve better collaborations in your organization. An important factor in achieving a fast and efficient process is ensuring that everyone has access to the most accurate and up-to-date versions of your vendor document. Using a software that can eliminate the need for physical filling and cluttered storage will help you become more organized and will eliminate human errors. Storing your documents in a software will provide your organization the ability to retrieve the vendor documents as quickly as possible.

Searching for misfiled documents can be very frustrating and time consuming. Using a software as your centralized repository for your vendor documents can reduce the time spent dealing with lost or misfiled documents, thus enhancing productivity and efficiency while allowing team members to perform tasks where their time is better spent.

When all of your vendor documents are in the same place, you have better visibility into that vendor. Most software offers varying levels of accessibility based on role. Different team members can have certain rights, permissions and levels of access that may be restricted to others. Having this in your vendor document repository software allows an audit trail and the ability to track updates with little effort.

Is risk always bad?

November 18, 2020/in Compliance, Financial Services, Markets, Risk Manager, Sales/by Kristi Daly

In our industry we are accustomed to thinking of risk as something we need to constantly assess and evaluate. At best, this exercise can be laborious and time-consuming. The number of risk factors to consider can run into the hundreds, often with different parts of the organization best qualified to assess each risk. The typical solution, emailing spreadsheets around the organization, is inherently cumbersome and error-prone.

Let’s take a step back and break down what a risk is. The definition of risk is a situation involving exposure to danger. But danger does not always look like we might expect. There is an important distinction to be made as some risks can actually pose a benefit to any company while others cause a greater reason for concern. Without risk, it can become easy to settle into consistency, security and stability.

Wouldn’t you like to know the importance of the risks you face and be able to easily identify them? Strunk’s Risk Manager can help identify risks you may be considering to help grow your business, as well as those risks that may present a greater threat to your organization. It helps to answer the questions:

What factors must financial institutions manage against?
At this point in time how much risk is each factor creating for us?
Do we have adequate management measures in place to manage the inherent risk?
And what is the trend – is our situation improving or getting worse?

Risk Manager tracks your risks in a database with fine-grained control over access. It documents your assessment of the inherent risk, the strength of your management of the risk and trend for both. If you must respond to a standards-based set of risks like banking industry requirements or SOC2, explicitly score yourself against these frameworks. The solution will map your policies against control activities to be sure you have appropriate policies in place that address each risk and will allow you to track your risk profile over time.

If you would like to bring together all areas of the risk assessment process into one easy to use format and eliminate your dependency on Excel spreadsheets, invest just 30 minutes to review our solution. Contact us at info@strunkaccess.com to learn more.