Crossword Cybersecurity Regulatory News (CCS)

New Rizikon Assurance 2.0 empowers companies to take control of

third-party risk

Every day new data breaches, CSR embarrassments and regulator fines are announced due to supplier failings, despite third-party risk being recognised as a necessary top ten corporate focus for 2019.

Rizikon Assurance 2.0 is designed to address this issue once-and-for-all - with Creditsafe integration, 360-degree Supplier Scorecards and a world-first Assurance Framework Dashboard showing a complete view of supply-chain risk.

4 September 2019 - London, UK - Crossword Cybersecurity plc (AIM: CCS), has today announced the availability of Rizikon Assurance 2.0, an online solution to the problem of third-party risk. The new version allows organisations to visualise all risks for each third-party through fully customisable 360-degree supplier scorecards. The new Third-party Assurance Framework Dashboard - an industry first - gives Supplier Management teams, Chief Risk Officers and senior executives a complete understanding of third-party risks across their supply chain, helping identify problem areas and prioritise remedial action.

Every day there is a new report of a third-party (often a supplier) causing financial, reputationalor regulatory harm to a company - this could be a data breach, an issue with child labour, a missed delivery date, or a safety problem. Rizikon Assurance helps companies address the pressure from Regulators, Auditors, Compliance professionals and customers to improve third-party assurance & risk management. It supports the Rizikon Supplier Assurance Framework, an optional, technology independent, methodology for organising, managing and measuring third-party risks.

Rizikon Assurance helps organisations take control of third-party risk with secure online assessments in their own branded portal, automated assessment scoring and workflows. Both standard and customised assessments are securely sent to third parties, once submitted online they are automatically scored, and can be manually rescored by 'Assessors', who can flag answers and return them for more detail or improved responses. Procurement and Supplier managers and executives can then instantly use data to understand the risks associated with that supplier, a specific risk area, or across the whole business.

Creditsafe integration

Rizikon Assurance 2.0 is now fully integrated with data sources from Companies House and credit ratings via Creditsafe. This means that Suppliers can be verified against Registered information, and limits financial exposure by giving finance and procurement teams instant access to the financial risk data for all Suppliers in the Creditsafe database of over 320 million companies. Credit risk can now be viewed alongside all other areas of Supplier risk (Cyber, GDPR, Continuity, etc.) on a single scorecard.

360o risk visibility for each third-party

New Rizikon Assurance Scorecards allow customers to see all risks for each third-party with combined risk information from the Assessments they have completed on multiple topics, as well as data from Companies House and credit-scoring from Creditsafe. Scorecards give an at-a-glance 360-degree view of third-party risk in a context defined by the customer, as each scorecard segment and weighted risk calculation is customisable.

Understand third-party risks and where they are concentrated

The industry-first Assurance Framework Dashboard gives executives and risk professionals a top-level view of all Risk across all third parties, organised by 'Impact levels'. It allows them to very quickly focus on high 'criticality' third parties needing the most attention and drill-down into those risks. The dashboard also highlights where assurance information gaps exist, which may leave a company exposed.

Rizikon Assurance comes with a growing library of standard assessments that organisations can use to support third-party assurance covering areas including Cyber Security, Modern Slavery, Anti Bribery & Corruption, GDPR and Minimum Wage legislation. These can be combined with customised assessments based on a customer's own tried and tested question sets.

Delivered as a SaaS platform, the installation and hosting, maintenance, support and security of Rizikon Assurance is taken care of by the Crossword Cybersecurity team, reducing both risk and total cost of ownership. Security features include two-factor authentication and 256-bit end-to-end encryption. All data is hosted in the UK across multiple data centres.

Jake Holloway, Director responsible for Rizikon Assurance, commented: "Despite third-party risks being one of the top enterprise risks for any large company or organisation, third-party risk assurance is often under resourced and simply not visible at board level in the same way as other areas, such as global trade policy or cyber security. The Rizikon Supplier Assurance Framework and Rizikon Assurance 2.0 give companies a methodology and software platform that improves third-party assurance and risk management through efficiency, automation and better visibility of risk areas and individual suppliers. Finally, boardrooms can answer the question 'How much third-party risk do we have and exactly where is it?'"

A brochure outlining the features and benefits of Rizikon Assurance 2.0 can be downloaded at https://www.rizikon.io/s/RA2.pdf

Contacts

Crossword Cybersecurity plc - Tel: +44 (0) 20 3953 8460

Email: info@crosswordcybersecurity.com

Tom Ilube, Chief Executive Officer

Mary Dowd, Finance Director

Grant Thornton (Nominated Adviser) - Tel: +44 (0) 20 7383 5100

Colin Aaronson / Jamie Barklem /Niall McDonald

Hybridan LLP (Broker) - Tel: +44 (0)203 764 2341

Claire Louise Noyce

For media enquiries contact:

Lorena Duke, GingerPR

lorena@gingerpr.co.uk, 01932 485 300

About Crossword Cybersecurity plc

Crossword Cybersecurity plc focuses on the development and commercialisation of university research-based cyber security related software and cyber security consulting. The Group's specialist cyber security product development and software engineering teams work with its university partners to develop the research concept into a fully-fledged commercial product that it will then take to market. The Group's aim is to build up a portfolio of revenue generating, intellectual property based, cyber security products. Rizikon Assurance, Crossword's leading product, is a SaaS platform that enables medium to large companies to assess the cyber maturity and GDPR readiness of their suppliers. Crossword's team of expert cyber security consultants leverages years of experience in national security, defence and commercial cyber intelligence and operations to provide bespoke advice tailored to its clients' business needs.