Impero A/S ($IMPERO)

All right. Welcome, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today for the Impero Q1 Product Update Webinar. We are extremely thrilled to see so many of you here. But before we get started, there's just a few things that you need to know. This webinar here is being recorded. And we'll share with you afterwards an e-mail, and we'll also share in our help center. Please feel free to use the Q&A button if you have any questions, and all the questions will be answered at the end of the webinar. Quick intro to myself first here. My name is Morten Christensen. I am Customer Experience Director here in Impero, and I'll be the moderator here for today. And joining me, I have 3 fantastic colleagues. I'll hand over to you first, Kristian.

Thank you, Morten. Hey, everyone. My name is Kristian Jensen, and I'm the Head of Product here in Impero. I'm really excited to see so many participants in the webinar and so many familiar names as well. Today, I'll be focusing on the recent releases since the beginning of the year, but also talk a little bit about what's to come and road map. And then I'll do a deep dive into entity management. Over to you, Raquel.

Thank you, Kristian. Well, first of all, welcome, everyone. It's great to have so many of you with us today. Raquel, Product Manager here at Impero. And today, I'll be walking you through a new addition to the risk module. And over to you, David.

Thank you. I'm David, I'm CTO here at Impero. And I'm going to talk a little bit about AI and all the quite amazing things that we are working on and what we are launching very short term.

Perfect. Thank you. And while you scratch the surface a little bit on this. But just to highlight what you can expect here from us today. We'll do a walk-through of our most recent releases, and then we'll do a revisit of our product road map and what's ahead, and we have a few features in focus. Whereas Raquel will talk a little bit about our insights tab and risk module, which is about AI and our journey here in Impero, and wrap things up with entity management. And then as I already mentioned, we'll do a Q&A in the end. So again, if you have any questions, please utilize the Q&A button in Zoom, and we'll answer them for the best of our capabilities towards the end of the webinar. Before we get going, we'd like to kick things off here with a poll. I would like to know what is the biggest challenges you are facing today in managing risk and controls. Is it designing effective controls? Is it embedding these controls into the daily operation? Is it staying ahead of regulatory changes? That you have limited resources or lean teams? Balancing global standards with local requirements? Or is it any other things? You can feel free to answer that and to write that in the chat as well. We'll give everyone here a few seconds to answer the poll and then we can see the results afterwards. Perfect. So we see the distribution here between the answers. I think the majority -- for the majority of you, it's embedding the controls into the daily operations and then it's also that we are working with limited resources or lean teams. And then that's closely followed by designing effective controls and staying ahead of the regulatory changes. So thank you so much for the submission. And it's really, really exciting. So let's continue with you, Kristian, and talk a little bit about the recent releases and road maps.

Thank you. Yes, I'll be talking a little bit about what's -- what we already did, but also what's to come and trying to focus and highlight some of the things that we're doing there. Next slide, please. All right. So we already have the control testing module, it's one of an add-on module that is used by our customers to maintain effective and efficient controls. In the last quarter, we have also added 2 key features to help with controlled testing, particularly random sampling, but also estimated sample activities. Random sampling is -- enables the control test creator to require random sampling as a part of the control test, effectively avoiding potential cherry picking of certain samples. And then the other part, the estimated sample activities is a helping hand when creating control tests to ensure that you have a wide enough scope so that the control test can actually run efficiently. Next slide, please. Premium files was already possible with an Impero platform, but we have now extended that functionality to also include Excel files and CSV files. Premium files can, of course, and sometimes make it much faster to review or perform controls, but it also removes a critical or can remove a critical thing of like needing to download a local copy of a file to your local machine, effectively reducing some of the risk there. Next slide, please. We also added some negative filters and adjusted view functionality on some of our table components, particularly in the pending actions and testing activities. These are smaller quality of life improvements that is basically trying to make the overall platform a little bit more consistent and having some functionality that you can recognize across the various tables on the platform. So this is something that we are in the process of rolling out to additional tables along the platform. And if you do the next slide. Then we have a lot more things have been released, but you can get a full overview of this and a deep dive into it within our knowledge center. Here are just a few of them. We added the functionality so you can now view previous control results as a reviewer. This is similar to how it already was if you're a performer. We have also added the reporting period to all relevant e-mails that is being sent out in your inbox. So it's a little bit easier to sort through and get an understanding of what's the most urgent thing to react on. And within the risk map and the risk module, we have added the functionality to make it mandatory to add a control as a response. But this is something that would basically need to be configured for your specific risk map and it's not enabled by default, but it's a fairly small task on our side to do so. So that was a little bit about what we have already released. Now I'll move on to the road map. So moving on to the road map, and this should hopefully be a familiar sight for those of you who have participated in these webinars before. I've already gone through some of the things that are in blue. And if I haven't gone through them, that means that we'll dive into them a little bit later in the process -- sorry, later in the webinar here. But we'll start with focusing on the green boxes and then later going into the yellow boxes. So the green boxes are things that are already in progress within the Impero platform and that we're working hard on enabling for all of you. So if we start with the green boxes, we have entity management and dynamic data sheets, which is something that I'll go into a little bit more detail in a deep dive on entity management and the current progress there. Then from left to right, we have control analytics, which is basically an add-on or something that we are -- is related to the dashboard functionality, but where we're working on giving you a little bit more insights into specific challenges across the full control life cycle and yes, expanding on the existing dashboard functionality. On the AI features, we have David with us today, which will be going into a full detail of what we're working on and our approach to AI. So I'll let him cover that in the section. But moving further to the right, we have connectivity, which is where we are basically trying to upgrade our Power BI connector, and we're also in the final phases of supporting provisioning and deprovisioning of users through identity management systems. We're going to start with Azure. We're also going to be adding functionality for Okta. So you can basically through this system provision and deprovision users. If I move on to the yellow boxes, and I'll start over on the left side again, and with the postponed activity due date, we recognize that there can be different reasons why we need to postpone the due date for control. So we want to make this a little bit easier while, of course, still logging the action that we had a specific activity here that was postponed. And besides all the things that are in green, we're also working on additional prototypes with AI, and it's generally speaking, an area where we see a lot of potential. But of course, there's also a lot of risk. So we're trying to balance that. Over in the section around user experience and user interface, we are basically trying to do some changes with our e-mails, particularly around like potentially supporting a wider white labeling of e-mail logos and colors. We're also trying to investigate the possibility of doing custom mail servers so that e-mails that are in theory being sent by Impero will be sent by an organization's own mailbox to hopefully reduce confusion around like, what is this e-mail from Impero for internal users in your organizations. And if I end at the right section of integration and connectivity, we are exploring additional ways to have a -- to deepen our integration with SAP as well as overall integrations, overall improvements to our APIs and MCP. So that's what will -- what is covered on the road map. I'm sure there's a lot of questions, or if there is, please feel free to answer them -- or sorry, ask them, and then we'll make sure to answer them in this process. But now over to Raquel, who will be presenting our new tab in the risk module.

Thanks a lot, Kristian. Definitely, a lot of exciting things coming up this year. On my side, I'll be introducing the insights tab that is the newest addition to the risk module. This is something that we developed to address a common challenge we see when working with risk maps, that is basically getting a clear view of how risks change over time. So previously, in Impero, if you wanted to understand what actually changed between 2 reporting periods, you had to compare those views manually. And the goal with this new risk insights tab is that now you can compare 2 points in time directly and then clearly see how your risk landscape has evolved. So let me just share my screen, and I'll be showing you exactly how this looks like. Okay. Hopefully, you're able to see my screen now. So here within the risk management module in the risk map, you'll now see a new tab that is called insights. And then the structure of the page is very similar to the risk map tab, with the difference that here on the top left corner, you can find this date selector that basically allows you to compare your risk landscape between 2 selected dates. So here, you simply need to choose a start date and then an end date, for example, this one. And this will allow you to see how your risks have changed between these 2 selected points in time. There are essentially 2 parts in this view. First of all, the map and then the table. Starting with the map, it works very similar to the regular risk map. And basically, here, you can see the distribution of the different risks that you have for the latest date. What's new here is that it also highlights how this distribution has changed compared to the earlier selected date. So for example, if we look at these bubbles over here, each bubble represents the number of risks in that quadrant for the latest date. And then the indicator on top shows how that number has changed compared to the earlier one. So if we take this quadrant as an example, here we can see that there are 3 risks in this quadrant, which is a 2 risk increase compared to the earlier date in that same quadrant. Basically, here, the goal is to be able to spot and understand where the different risks are increasing, decreasing and then -- or remaining stable across the map. Then if we go below the heat map, you'll be able to find a table that shows you a more detailed breakdown of the risks that are included in the comparison. So basically, for each risk and then for each entity, you can see the value that is at the earlier date and then the change to the value at the later date, if there was any. If we take an example, we can see that here in this specific risk, when it comes to inherent impact, it went from high to very high. And when it comes to inherent likelihood, it went from likely to highly likely. And just like in the risk map as well, you can apply the filters to focus your analysis, and you can do that directly by clicking on the heat map or by using the filter on the top. And one new addition to this as well is that you'll be able to spot the new and removed risks between that selected period. And you can see that with these green and red labels shown on the table. Also, if you'd like to go deeper into how this all works, we have a detailed help center article that also includes a walk-through video from William, that is our Implementation Specialist. And the next step for us here is to help you interpret this data even more easily. And that's why we're working on using AI to explain all these key changes, but in a more plain language. And with that, I'll hand it over to David that will go deeper into all these upcoming AI features and our approach to it.

Perfect. Thank you very much, Raquel. It looks really good. Can you share the presentation, Morten? Yes. So I'm going to talk a little bit about AI in Impero. We have talked about it before on previous webinars. Since then, we have been working very hard on building actual features. Please, the next slide, Morten. Yes, that will actually be able to create a lot of value for our customers. So what we would like to reiterate a little bit is our stance on AI. There's a lot of platforms in the market in our space that is basically promoting an AI first approach. We are a little bit cautious to this as we see a different path. I think it's extremely important to utilize AI in the right ways to basically reflect on the first poll that was filled out to solve some of the things that are actually relevant in the day-to-day work, meaning how can we improve the completion of controls, how do we make controls operational, and how do we also make the managing of controls as easy as possible. So we want to use AI where it makes sense for risk and control processes. We don't believe that AI, especially in our realm, will be able to replace human validation and verification. It probably can, but I think it will require legal changes. And that's not something that we are going to be looking into short term. And we don't believe that AI should make governance decisions independently. So we want to make an AI feature set that is as frictionless as possible to use, basically giving you guys a little bit of superpowers in running the Impero platform. And again, just to reiterate, we are not enabling AI for any tenant unless explicitly opted in by the admin of the platform. We are not training on any of your data. And we basically design features to decrease the risk of leaking data to AI and models. So just emphasizing that because I think it's extremely important that we don't just throw data around to different AI models without thinking about it. So next slide, please. So how are we prioritizing AI? Well, basically, these 3 pillars underpin it quite well. We want to accelerate the risk and control processes. We want to simplify the day-to-day operations, and we want to support insight-driven decision-making. It's about assisting -- basically assisting, giving insights into the current processes, have AI use metadata to assess patterns, identify potential problems, shortcomings in the setups. But it's also about removing manual time repetitive tasks and providing us good starting points as possible for building and managing the entire setup. I think underpinning all of this is a philosophy that AI has to make sense from a margin perspective. So essentially lowering the time operators spend in managing the controls, but especially actually lowering the friction in your organizations in collecting the controls and reviewing them and so forth. If we can lower that time by even a few percent, then we'll save your organizations a lot of money and increasing your margins. So that is sort of the underlying main goal of the initiatives that we're taking. So next slide, please. In late May -- or sorry, late April, early May, we are going to launch this, what we call the Impero Assistant. It's basically an AI assistant within the platform that basically covers a lot of the things that we just talked about, but it's meant as human validated and always audit-ready. It's basically a set of different features that will start out by optimizing the different workflows, but it will also be set out to give you insights that you might not see yourself in the platform. So the 2 features are being launched that are covering the control modules or basically the setting up of controls and 2 features in the risk module that will utilize metadata to summarize and shed some insights on the risk maps and the risks that you have in your organization. Next slide, please. So as you can see here, these are just some screenshots. We are going to have a launch of this that will be communicated. And you're, of course, very welcome to participate in that. The first thing that I could just elaborate a little bit about is the Impero Assistant, and that is basically set up for building or helping to build controls and setting up controls. We've seen a pattern where some customers or some users actually leak data to external LLMs by, for instance, in the description field, often a control, copy and paste between ChatGPT or other not necessarily validated platforms in order to get writing help. So what we did was we basically built a context-aware writing assistant within the platform that can actually help you suggest things, rewrite, shorten and basically make anything that you would expect from a writing assistant within the application. We also are going to do task suggestions, for instance. So you can -- based on title control program, description, have a task section already presuggested and prebuilt, lowering the time and effort for you guys to set up controls. On the right-hand side, there is a slight preview of some risk insights. It basically speaks a lot to what Raquel presented. It's also been done by Raquel's team. So very nice work there. But basically, it adds a section that based on the data that you see in a risk map or time span of a risk map, it will be able to summarize, give you pointers and actually underpin specific things that you might need to either do actions on or similar. So lots of things coming. We have a stack of prototype features that are really exciting that we're also working on, but we'll have more on that later. So looking forward to showing it to you, guys.

Thank you. David. It looks really exciting. So I will turn it back to you, Kristian, for something that a lot of our customers are also really looking forward to.

Yes, talking about things that excites one. I'm really excited to talk about entity management. We had our Co-Founder, Morten, Morten Balle, in the last webinar go through a little bit of the motivation of like why we're doing entity management and what will be possible within entity management. I will be trying to focus a little bit on the value that can be generated in terms of central governance and local management, whether for teams of 5 or 500, all focused on this principle here, one control framework, centrally governed and locally managed. Next slide, please. So Impero already today allows organizations to define and operate a central control framework aligned with the internal governance model. Entity management is effectively an extension of this by introducing an organizational layer on top that enables for a more granular access control and a clear delegation of operational ownership within the organization. So as a global or group admin, you can create one single control program and apply it across multiple entities, each individual entity or each local entity will therefore only have access to information relevant to their own entity and they can be granted access based on standard access rights, whether they need to be able to change things, whether the owner should be able to view things or whether it should be the owner of their local entity. So in that way, they can be set up so they can be granted access to set performers and reviewers on the tasks, and this can still be managed on a global level as well as the local admin can also send reminders and follow-up on assignments in terms of things going on with the local entity. This effectively enables organizations to maintain one control framework with a granular access control and a strong data separation between various entities. So what does this look like in practice? Let's take a look at a feature, a specific feature. Next slide, yes. So some of you may know datasheets. Some of you may not. Datasheets is a way that can already be used today of pushing data in either through either manually or through an ERP or API integration where you typically would have structured data that is used as a part of a control today. This could be an example here of a balance reconciliation. And with entity management, a datasheet is going to be able to have one column, which is going to be entity, which basically links each item in each column with a specific entity. Therefore, as shown here in the diagram, each assignment that each local entity will see will only contain data that is relevant to the local entity. This allows the same control and the same datasheet to be used -- reused across multiple entities, reducing the administrative overhead while safeguarding entity-specific information and not leaking data among various entities. Next slide, please. So what is the current status of entity management? And when can I use it? As it stands today, if entity management is enabled within your tenant, it's possible to create entities, control programs and controls. We believe that by Q2, you will be able to run your controls through one centrally governed control framework and actually use this in your production environment. And when we look towards the summer and towards Q3, what we'll be adding is more local ownership and more delegation of responsibility so that the local admins can basically manage their own entity while still adhering to this overall governance framework of a group structure. So that's all from my side. I want to invite any questions you may have on entity management. And otherwise, I'll just say thank you for listening to this presentation. But over to you, Morten, and I'm sure we'll have lots more polls and so on.

Thank you, Kristian, David and Raquel for fantastic updates. There's lots of fantastic things that has already happened, and luckily also, fantastic things ahead as well. As Kristian mentioned, I will just launch actually a few, 2 more polls. So it's not a whole lot. But the first one here is whether you'd like to be in an early test on the upcoming features, both within entity management or AI in Impero or obviously both. We'll reach out to you separately, actually from my team as well, so we can plan how we do this in the best way. I know that I've already talked to a few of you guys out there, mainly around the entity management on, okay, how can we actually plan if there are some things that needs to shift from one setup to another or there is an additional rollout where it would actually be beneficial to do that with entity management versus what the current setup looks like. So please fill in the poll here, both regarding entity management, but especially also around these AI features here that we are doing. So we have a chance to, yes, reach out to you afterwards and see if you're eligible for any beta or early access on these. So we can make sure that we both test them as good as possible, these features, but also to make sure that you get as much value as possible at the earliest possible stage. I'll just give you a few more seconds here before we proceed. Perfect. And again, we see a very nice distribution here. There are some that are interested in the entity management part, a lot who are interested in the AI as well. And luckily, even more who are interested in both. And we are aware that there are some who would not be in scope for these parts here past years as well. But we'll definitely stay in touch from the customer success managers. So we'll reach out to you afterwards. I'll just see If I can hit the next slide here. Yes, that worked. Perfect. So before we move over to the questions, just a few things we would like to highlight here as well. Our help center, it's actually both available directly from the platform in the lower left corner, but also through [email protected]. There's tons of material here, and we've actually really started utilizing -- Raquel mentioned this as well with some of the video guidelines that we've done with William as well. So we are really spending quite a lot of efforts on both describing these updates that we're doing but also with supporting material. We also have a new blog, and we are simplifying our SOX webinar recap, and you can read that here as well and to stay connected and to make sure that you're up to date with Impero news, you can always follow us on LinkedIn for any behind the scenes actions as well that's happening along with company news, et cetera. And then especially, these might be the ones who are at least local in my area, around Aarhus. We'll do a hosting and networking event here in a month's time in April. So please join us on that. And again, we'll share the material here afterwards. You can also find it on our website. It's going to be really fantastic as well. Finally, sign up for the newsletter, the QR code is available on the screen now. As mentioned before, there is a -- there were 2 polls. This is the final one. So we spent quite a lot of time on our marketing. I was just trying to take some credit for that. But our marketing team is spending quite a lot of effort and time on how we actually communicate best in these items. And especially our newsletter is something that's really, really evolved over the last year or so. So with this, I know a lot of you are receiving this already, and if there's some content that you would prefer to see some more of in the future as well, then we just have a quick poll on that, so we can make sure that we focus our efforts also from a marketing perspective, obviously, on again, to provide you with the information that is most valuable for you. And while we wait for that, should you have any questions, either in general or for the features that now that we have, the entire product team after almost at least a year. Then please fill in your questions in the Q&A section, and then we'll skip to that or jump to that in a moment. We have a few minutes to answer those before we wrap up. Actually, I think we want a little bit of everything. So that's fantastic. So both more of these checklists, events and webinars and customer stories. So thank you so much for providing that information to the marketing team as well.

So let's dive to the questions. I'll just get them on my screen here now. All right. I might route some of the questions to you guys specifically, but otherwise, just jump in if you have any. But I think there's one here that might be for you, David, around the -- do you have a time line for when the AI functionality will be available?

Yes, definitely. So as mentioned, we are planning to launch AI features in the beta scope in late April, early May. So if you are interested, please reach out and we can have a dialogue about how to enable it. But again, it has to be explicitly enabled per tenant as per our rules.

And just a follow up on that, there's a question whether a custom LLM can be used in -- by the Impero AI?

Currently, that's not possible for the main reason that we want to be able to govern what goes into any model and where that model resides. However, we have had discussions about -- for specific features, integrating eventually with customers on models. It could be that for data privacy reasons, some customers will have their own on-prem models running on their own hub. So it's definitely something that will be interesting to have a discussion about if there is a need and a requirement for that. So we're happy to have the discussion. So if you would like that, then please reach out, and then we'll be happy to talk about it.

Perfect. Then we have a question here, I think it's related to the entity management, about a little bit on the access rights. So would it be possible to grant access to a control program for a specific entity where users can only modify control owners and reviewers, but not the controls themselves?

Yes, that will be possible. So the idea is that you, as the global admin or the group admin, will be able to specify specific controls and specific control programs. And then you can basically specify how much access should the local entity be able to do. So in this case, you could say they should only be able to assign or reassign or send reminders and so on. They should not be able to touch anything in regards to the control. And therefore, they're able to do all the things that is more efficiently locally managed, but not the things that you want like to govern on a global or a general level. So that's definitely possible.

Perfect. Thank you for that. There's a question. I think it's actually more in general here. So what about something like holiday replacement for the task solver?

Yes. So we haven't looked into a specific holiday replacement functionality. But one thing that we definitely would like to do is make it when there is a specific holiday or similar coming up to make it super straightforward and maybe even highlight that something is going on and you maybe need to take an action here. And of course, if we talk like in the concept of entity management, then instead of the group admin needing to know that in this local entity, we have someone going on vacation soon, and I need to change this assignment, then this will now be the responsibility of the local admin instead that hopefully will sit a little bit closer with the specific team member or team members.

Perfect. And there's a few here that I'll just quickly answer as well. Is it possible to get the presentation afterwards? And yes, we will share everything here afterwards as well. So the slide deck here, and you also get a copy of the recording. So you can see that part as well. Let's see here, actually, there's quite a lot coming in. So let me just see. Do we have any updates on reporting pages in general? If you can, few words on that?

So there is no specific larger upcoming changes to the reporting page. But I'm not entirely sure exactly what areas would be interesting. So I would love to follow up with the person asking the question afterwards to understand a little bit deeper what the ask is here.

Perfect. Thank you for that. And there's something that is actually related to maybe the additional cost on entity management in this case here. Does the new entity management create additional cost? Or does it need to -- just need to be activated on demand?

Yes. So entity management is a part of the enterprise subscription. And should you be in doubt of what sort of subscription you're on, I invite you to reach out to support or your CSM, and I'm sure they will be able to advise you. But it is a functionality targeted for larger enterprise organizations. So yes, I hope that answered the question.

Perfect. It definitely did. And I think we have time for a few more questions here. So I think there's still a lot about the AI as well. So will there be more AI features available later this year?

I can take that. Definitely yes. I think we have a lot of working prototypes already, but being a little bit cautious in how we launch all the features in a timely manner. We are basically cherry-picking the ones that makes most sense first, but there will be quite a big handful. We are, to say the least, very far behind the scenes with a lot of optimizations. But as you can probably all appreciate, putting that much AI into the platform too quickly can also be a problem. So we are testing and experimenting a lot, and we would always love to engage in dialogues, understanding your workflows, how we could potentially optimize your workflows with the models that we are working on currently.

Perfect. And then we have -- I think it's around for the datasheet here. Is it possible to have an integration between systems like OneStream and Impero so that numbers can directly be interfaced, sorry, from other systems or OneStream in this case here to Impero instead of to manually updating the datasheets?

Yes, I can take that. So it is currently possible to integrate with the API that basically feeds into the datasheet today. And for the specific use case, I'm sure that there could be a solution there. Whether it's plug and play, it's probably not. But with -- it's a relatively straightforward integration process to actually implement this.

Perfect. And I think we actually have that described in our knowledge base as well. So you can see how you can actually -- I think it's called automate data population in the datasheet as well. So you can go to -- on our application [email protected]. So you can go in here and actually find that here as well. Final question of the day, how do I best provide feedback on new features like entity management and AI?

Yes. So with -- if you're already using some of the functionality or you're already engaged in conversation with us, I'm sure we're already talking with you about these things. But if you're one of the people that said, yes, I would like to try out some of these things or test them out, please, we encourage all sorts of feedback and input and we would also love to see how you're working with, for example, AI or what you would imagine entity management to be like in your organization. So you can reach out to your CSM or to support, and then I'm sure that we can, yes, do great things together.

Definitely. Thank you, everyone, for participating today. Thank you, Kristian, Raquel and David for the fantastic update. Final thing for me today is please save the date for next -- for our next quarterly update. It's going to be on June 24, and it's going to be really exciting as again, there's been a lot of great updates today. And obviously, we want to keep you as involved as possible. So thank you as well. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Have a fantastic rest of the week.

And should you have asked a question in the Q&A that's not answered, we'll make sure to follow up with you and answer it directly because I saw there was a lot of questions in the Q&A. So we'll reach out and follow up on those things. Thank you all for participating.

Definitely. Thank you for that addition, Kristian, there's quite a lot of questions. So it has been really exciting topics. So we'll be in touch.