The Rise of GRC

In the wake of WikiLeaks revelations of critical data, Asian banking institutions now are paying even greater attention internally to issues of governance, risk and compliance, says K. Sugumaran of RSA.The potential risk of seeing inside information made public is terrifying at the highest level of banking institutions, says K. Sugumaran of RSA. "In Asia Pacific, GRC is becoming a very big thing," Sugu says. "I'm seeing GRC [attention] from the CEO down, mostly in some of the large banks in Southeast Asia."

Specifically, banking institutions are paying more attention to IT risk, he says, as well as ensuring that their online banking systems are fail-safe to avoid costly outages.

In an exclusive interview about GRC at financial institutions, Sugu discusses:

• Top GRC challenges for banks;
• How Asian banks are tackling these challenges;
• Where to start in improving GRC capabilities.

Sugu is the Managing Director for Southeast Asia at RSA. He comes to RSA with a distinguished career record, having been the Partner Sales Director, Asia Pacific for Oracle and prior to Oracle, he spent 10 years at Sun Microsystems at various management roles. Sugu's career with Oracle started after the acquisition with Sun, where he held various leadership positions including Director of Partner Sales, Storage Sales and Systems Sales for South Asia. Earlier in his career, he was Netscape's general manager for Asia South and also the Country Manager for Novell Singapore. Sugu has consistently led his team to overachieve throughout his career and has various club awards under his belt.