In the economic landscape of the 21st century, an organization’s business model is challenged constantly by competitors and events that could give rise to substantial risks. The financial market especially has experienced significant events that have drastically altered corporate GRC principles. Some of these major events include the ‘tech bubble burst’ of the early 2000s, large corporate scandals such as Enron and failure of banks functions that ended up in the 2007–2008 global financial crises. These events had major repercussions across the globe which in turn intensified the need for competent GRC solutions. This propelled the Indian GRC market, which is expected to be worth around $24 billion in the next five years, to put forth effort and eventually ended up in asking, “How to effectively implement and manage policies and support controls to maintain a strong risk posture?” However, the environments organizations manage are often widely distributed and subject to multiple regulatory requirements & internal audit requirements and must adapt to changing business needs. Not everyone can perceive these and provide solutions accordingly to griddle the unexpected risk with a proper governance and compliance system; for that, a proper system and tool should be implemented. This is where Etrends Technologies comes into picture. This Mumbai headquartered organization provides a range of fully customizable solutions for corporate governance.“We always believed in creating some unique products and offering niche services to the community so the name was taken as Etrends, meaning setting new trends in the software industry,” expounds Manesh Karani, Founder, Etrends Technologies.

A Journey to Mitigate Risk

In order to offer a proper GRC tool, one has to not only have a complete understanding of the muddy compliance waters but also must know what a system does, how it's used, what other systems/processes depend on it and what existing compensating controls are in place; when it comes to Etrends Technology it defines the above statements moothly. “None of the top organizations or the business houses that time had any application or automation tool that was managing their risk management or audit management or compliance management. Everything was done over an excel sheet,” Manesh recollects.

Founded in 2008, the organization had a humble beginning as a web development firm. Being a custom web development firm, Etrends came across one of the client’s audit and risk management need, which triggered them to think about the future that lies in the GRC management sector. According to Manesh, the firm successfully developed a risk and audit management software in the year 2008 for a client and realized the unseen depth of GRC sector later in the year 2009. “The journey of Etrends has been very interesting from the date of inception as a Partnership firm way back in 2003. We started as a website development company and helped many small and big companies in creating their websites,” he says.

Things changed in the year 2006, when the firm got an opportunity to work with Ernst and Young to develop a web application for Project Management, for one of their client. This gave team Etrends a new beginning to look at a niche market of web applications instead of developing regular websites. “We started developing projects for web applications from big corporates to automate their processes since very few players were there in web application development,” add Manesh.

It’s been said that ‘make hay while the sun shine’; back in the year 2009, the market was recovering from the recession impact and this is when Etrends made the hay. The Indian market was trembling and companies that relayed on giant software firms were fetching for affordable GRC solutions. “During this time we got an opportunity to come into the market, we were confident about the quality of the product that we were delivering and the type of knowledge which we had. We successfully implemented few projects for big listed companies, giving assurance to them that even a small sized company also can deliver the products which flourished organizations offer,” adds Manesh. Since then the firm completely focused on GRC tools and today Etrends is one of the leading companies in the GRC space.

LASER - A Tool That Defines Perfection

Over the past decade, the business world has been bombarded with the latest and greatest buzzwords, all designed to usher in a variety of tools and differentiate them from legacy technologies. However, selecting the appropriate GRC tool for a specific environment is a daunting task, it's not something that an organization can hand off to their IT department and hope for the best.

One of the biggest retail chains in India, with more than 400 stores and 4-5 brands across the country was looking to automate the Internal Audit process which was done manually. Every month the pain of compiling the data across 400+ stores, preparing reports and getting the gaps and tracking the issues was a major pain for them. The management was not able to get any status promptly, also the productivity of the audit team was utilized less than 50 percent in core audit activities and rest of the time was spent in collating, creating reports. This is when they approached Etrends Technologies; the firm helped them to simplify and automate the complete process and that too in a record time of two months. This was done by the implementation of LARS (Laser Audit Reporting System), a solution that can provide real-time completion status of ongoing audits at all locations.

LARS is one of the four competent solutions offered by Etrends under the brand name LASER. Under the brand “LASER” the company renders a range of applications which cater to the requirements of an organization specifically for Risk, Legal Compliance, Internal Audit Reporting and Internal Financial Control Management Systems. LASER not only helps organizations to measure the rate of risks but also navigate them to reach at the apt solution to mitigate it too. Today, Etrends takes pride in the successful implementation of the LASER products across companies of varying sizes and complexity in various business and technology domains across the nation and offers fantastic four corporate governance tools under LASER.

Another solution under this brand name is LERMS® (LASER Enterprise Risk Management System). “LERMS is a web-based solution that delivers a central risk management system for identifying risks, evaluating the likelihood and impact, relating them to mitigating controls and tracking their resolution,” explains Manesh.