Illustrative scenario
Consider a financial institution using models and analytics across credit, fraud, treasury, and portfolio management. Its governance artifacts may be distributed across shared drives, inventories, validation folders, and committee records.
Model owners, risk teams, and internal audit need a consistent way to connect inventory entries with approvals, validation, monitoring, issues, and controlled changes.
The business challenge
The challenge is to establish completeness and traceability without recreating documents for every review. Records need clear ownership, current versions, and a reliable connection to the model and period under review.
A useful evidence package should show both completed work and unresolved gaps. Organized documentation does not replace validation, independent challenge, or remediation of control weaknesses.
Proposed approach
The proposed Cicrim approach defines a repeatable package around the institution’s model lifecycle and oversight needs. Two capabilities provide the foundation:
- Evidence structure: Organize model purpose, ownership, risk tier, validation, monitoring, issues, changes, and approval records in a consistent sequence.
- Evidence workflow: Assign collection, review, version management, access, and completeness checks to named roles.
The design would specify required artifacts, acceptable evidence, naming and version rules, access, and review responsibilities. Missing or outdated items would enter the issue-management process rather than disappear from the package.
A pilot review should ask independent stakeholders to trace selected decisions, model changes, monitoring exceptions, and remediation through the proposed evidence structure.
Benefits to evaluate against the institution’s baseline:
- Preparation effort: Compare the time needed to locate and assemble current review records.
- Completeness: Assess missing, outdated, or inconsistent artifacts against documented requirements.
- Traceability: Test whether reviewers can connect model activity to decisions and approvals.
- Review usability: Evaluate clarity, issue visibility, and the effort needed for independent assessment.