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SEPTEMBER 2017 34 INHOUSE (left to right) Jane Waechter, Pamela Gauthier, Lisa Barrett, Kara Beitel, Agata Wszolek, Nina Genova, Lisa Wong. Missing from photo: Pascale Elharrar, Tania Lopes. T his may sound familiar to many large organizations: Each month, you ex- change important data between business units on Excel spreadsheets, but you never fully capture the data in a way that can ben- efit the organization in real time. At BMO Financial Group, the bank's liti- gation group was doing this kind of exercise with the bank's operational risk group on a monthly basis. The exercise was time con- suming, had the potential for human error and required many, many steps. The litigation practice management group is a group within the bank's legal and compliance group comprised of litiga- tion lawyers supporting different areas of the bank's business. It was created to ensure that best practices and processes for litiga- tion risk management were adopted uni- formly across the company. The litigation group feeds data about losses through to the operational risk group at BMO. On both ends of the process, they have technology that's owned and managed by different groups at BMO. "For a long time, we had a process where we would take data from one system and pass it in a spreadsheet format to people who owned the other system and then they would map it into their system," says Jane Waech - ter, associate general counsel and head of the litigation practice group at BMO Financial Group. "So we decided we should have those two systems speak directly to each other and take out all the manual process." For this initiative, the LPMG working with BMO's operational risk group took the largely manual monthly process of reporting risk events on spreadsheets, which involved multiple groups across the bank, and transformed it into an automated, real-time activity. This was achieved by integrating exist - ing technologies — the legal group's case management tool and the risk group's data- base of operational loss events, one of which would be litigation losses. "We partnered with our technology group Automation of data exchange cuts time, delivers information in real time By Jennifer Brown Category: Risk Management Department size: Large Company: BMO Financial Group RAMESH PURADCHITHASAN