CRISIL Ltd today announced that SMART, its cognitive automation platform, has been certified as meeting the Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 Type 1 Trust Service Criteria standards established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).

SMART enables end-to-end digitalisation of financial research and spreading workflows.

SOC 2 Type 1 evaluation verifies if internal controls have been designed and implemented to meet the requirements set forth in the Trust Service Criteria for security, availability, processing integrity and confidentiality developed by the AICPA. The independent audit was conducted by BDO.

Says Zak Murad, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer, CRISIL, “SOC 2 compliance is considered the ‘gold standard’ of information security and data integrity. We are delighted that SMART, with an increasing adoption among global clients, has achieved this benchmark. This reiterates our strong commitment to ensuring highest levels of integrity across our offerings.”

SMART facilitates investment research teams – both on the sell-side and the buy-side – to manage their core research activities within a single, digitalised environment. Credit risk teams can leverage SMART as a comprehensive spreading solution right from extracting data from documents and mapping them to desired taxonomies to generation of models and peer benchmarking. Investment banks can utilise SMART for unified data compilation across varied sources, scenario-based modelling, profile building and broader analytical requirements.

SMART can be deployed within client premises as well as on private cloud owned by client or under a managed-service model with CRISIL. Originally envisioned as a product to support research analysts with coverage initiations and efficient earnings management, SMART has constantly evolved with growing market needs and technological advancements.

Says Abhik Pal, Director, Global Head of Research, CRISIL, “With increased cloud adoption and wider tech-driven demands, we see clients exploring SMART for use cases beyond traditional financial modeling to cover digitalisation of ESG tearsheets, credit assessment scorecards, data monitors and compilation of thematic newsletters to name a few. We also observe a preference for a hosted services model with CRISIL-managed cloud as it aids in faster on-boarding and dynamic scale-up.”

SMART facilitates documents, data, models, reports and analysis to all reside within a single digitalised ecosystem. The application also ensures superior data governance with an audit trail of every data point back to its source documents and hosts a suite of ready-to-call utilities leveraging CRISIL’s deep domain expertise working with global clients in the research and risk arena for about two decades.

Says Dimitri Londos, President & Business Head, CRISIL Global Research and Risk Solutions, “A number of clients across the globe today rely on our SMART platform for gaining operational excellence and a wholesome digitalised experience across the entire workflow. The SOC 2 conformity is a great reassurance to our clients, partners and prospects that they can rely on us without any concerns on data privacy and security.”

(You can find more details about the SMART platform at https://www.crisil.com/en/home/what-we-do/financial-products/smart.html)