New Year Insights for the procurement solutions and services marketplace 2024: Riskonnect

For several years now, Spend Matters has been collecting and publishing a series of articles about procurement, supply and services trends for the year ahead from expert tech and service providers in the market.

This year we’re highlighting the customer demands, market movements and advances in procurement tech that are exciting the world of solution providers, how they expect them to shape the S2P landscape next year and how they plan to respond to them.

Our series runs from mid-December to mid-January, then our senior analysts will wrap up with their own take on the key themes that emerge.

In no order of preference, other than by the date they arrived in our inbox, today let’s hear from Jim Wetekamp, CEO of Riskonnect.

Risk management will evolve with emerging risks

Businesses are bracing for another challenging year ahead as an influx of threats hits the enterprise. Economic uncertainty still looms. Geopolitical instability is at a high and impacting supply chains. Generative AI risks and governance concerns are rising. Ransomware, deepfakes and other sophisticated cybersecurity and payment fraud issues are emerging and evolving at full speed.

A bright spot amidst the challenges is that companies’ approaches to managing risk are evolving just as fast. Many organizations are actively choosing to change how they govern, prioritize and oversee risk. More than half (52%) of organizations have a chief risk officer, and another 6% plan to hire one within the next year. This is a dramatic increase compared to recent years when chief risk officers were much less common. Risk management team headcount and spending on risk management technology has held steady despite the economy. Nearly a third of companies (28%) have reported budget increases for risk management technology in the past six months. We’ll likely see more organizations invest in their risk functions and capabilities next year as the need to protect the business becomes even more urgent.    

We’ll also continue to see notable developments in artificial intelligence, data analytics and automation to enable continuous automated compliance. This means AI risk management and governance will need to be a higher priority. AI use cases will include incident severity scoring, control mapping and testing, policy and business impact analysis generation, and smart suggestions.

According to recent survey data, just 9% of companies say they’re prepared to manage generative AI risks, and just 17% say they have formally trained or briefed their staff on the risks. Generative AI and other advanced technologies can bring tremendous value to organizations and their supply chains when the risks are managed in an effective way. Getting a handle on the risks now is paramount for organizational success in 2024 and beyond. 

Many thanks to Riskonnect for being a part of the series.

Read our senior analyst’s take on the key themes from the series here.

If you need to find the right procurement technology provider or service for your business needs next year, try Spend Matters TechMatch for a free rapid shortlist.

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As always, reach out to discover how Spend Matters can help with your new year commitments and wishes.