If you work for a financial services company, you’re likely seeing an influx of security assessments and due diligence questionnaires (DDQs). With significant data breaches and scandals still fresh in our minds, it’s no wonder clients and prospects are laser-focused on reducing risk and upholding compliance.
As the quantity and complexity of questionnaires and assessments increases, it’s all but impossible for financial services companies to keep pace with deadlines manually. Some of the world’s leading financial services companies have turned to security questionnaires and DDQ automation software to increase quality and accomplish more without expanding their teams.
Let’s take a closer look at two of the key reasons why financial services companies need DDQ and security questionnaire automation software.
Save time while improving accuracy and quality.
Whether you’re responding to a Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire, SIG Lite, or a series of questions your prospective customer developed on their own, you need to deliver accurate answers to hundreds of detailed questions—often on very tight deadlines. Frequently, these questionnaires are one of the last requirements before customers sign their contracts. This dynamic means, the sooner you respond, the sooner you can close the deal.
This is where automation software comes in to accelerate the response process. Quality automation software provides one central library to store all your vetted and approved responses to commonly asked questions. Rather than cutting and pasting from old responses or creating new responses from scratch every time, you can complete questionnaire responses by inserting trusted library content.
Leading automation software also includes AutoFill functionality, which can insert the most appropriate answers to blocks of questionnaire questions in bulk. With this feature, you can go from a blank questionnaire to a solid first draft in minutes. From there, you can zero-in on trickier questions and questions you haven’t seen before. With the time you save from automation, you can focus more resources on tailoring and fine-tuning your responses, increasing overall quality.
Embrace content management to support compliance.
Many prospects and clients who ask financial services companies to complete security questionnaires and DDQs are in highly regulated industries themselves. They need audit trails that show who updated and approved information and when—and they expect you to display the same rigor in tracking changes.
Automation software tracks all users’ actions and records who created, edited, and approved content. This way, audit-trails build themselves, and you can export reports any time, on-demand. Automation software also archives past versions of content by default, so it’s simple to restore legacy versions as needed or compare previous versions to the latest ones.
Instead of fighting with back-and-forth emails to source new answers or get content updated, automation software provides customizable multi-step review and approval workflows. This way, you can be sure the right experts weigh-in on updates and automatically pull in the right stakeholders when it’s their turn to act.
Streamline your response process now—before it gets overwhelming.
For over 25 years, Qvidian has helped financial services companies stay ahead of DDQ and security questionnaire demands. Today, we work with four of the five world’s largest asset management companies, eight of the ten largest U.S. banks, and six of the ten largest European banks. (Tell me more.)
Recently, one of our clients reported a 150% year-over-year increase in requests for security information. Taking the time to set up automation software now, populate your content library, and establish a formal response process can prepare you to be more efficient and effective down the road. This way, you’ll never be caught off guard by a dramatic increase in demand.
For more information about how Upland Qvidian can help meet your financial services company’s needs, contact a Qvidian security questionnaire and DDQ response expert.