Case Studies: Novia Financial

Novia Financial is a wealth management service dedicated to investment advisors and their clients. It provides tools and software designed to manage the necessary information and reporting needed for investment purposes, whilst providing access to various product wrappers and investment funds.

The risk and compliance teams at Novia subscribe to the Risk and Compliance modules of Graci, but primarily make use of the Incident Management and Internal Loss Data functionality. The Graci Incident Management service allows the firm to define various data capture forms for different types of incidents, with bespoke field types and rules around required or optional data for each. Specific workflow can then be attached to each type of incident form, which can then automatically drive incidents as they are reported to the appropriate business unit and/or individual and/or job position for attention. Loss events reflect where a risk has manifested itself and usually results in either some form of financial loss, adverse efficiency impact, or an unexpected gain. The Graci Risk Internal Loss Data functionality allows the firm to record these losses and, based on industry-standard loss event data models, provides the ability to include event and impact types such as ‘near misses,’ opportunity costs and operationally driven credit losses.

Natalie Highmore, Compliance Associate at Novia, is the primary user of Graci, using it on a regular basis to record loss events and to extract management information. “Graci provides us with a framework to be able to log any complaints and breaches [incidents and loss events] that we have, to manage those through the process of identifying them and then rectifying them,” she explains. Brett Hanlon, Risk Manager at Novia also uses Graci to extract data for risk management purposes. “We use the root cause and trend data from our incidents and complaints to identify if there are any systemic failings in the business,” he says.