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Risk Leadership: Driving Cultural Change through Engagement

So many people that  I meet for the first time from outside the risk profession have a very poor perception of risk management as a discipline.  They see it as a compliance activity at best and most see it as a handbrake on business.  Recently my wife described me to a new acquaintance as one of the fathers of modern risk management and the person turned to me and said, “So you are to blame!”

You and I know the value of risk management. 

Since Darwin’s Origin of the Species we have recognised how nature adapts to survive.  Modern humankind continues to adapt to survive while following these two innate risk management principles:

•    If it hurts us we learn and take action in proportion to the degree of pain.

•    The next time we face the same pain we are better prepared and we go back for more and either avoid the pain or at least find a way of working to a new pain threshold.

Why history keeps repeating itself is simple really. 

Customers? They’re more connected and empowered than ever. The result? Financial services providers need to focus on the creation of customer platforms that deliver a satisfying experience, as well as the services and products they need.

What do we mean by a platform? In short, a platform seeks to provide an experience that adds value to the user experience beyond a list of services and products. A good platform also increases long- term customer engagement by adding new features and experiences

Marketplace Interview:

Let’s face it. Complexity is a fact of life in financial services. Mergers and acquisitions, organizational changes, and service offerings across multiple locations result in a maze of disparate and disconnected applications and platforms.

In this environment, radical action is needed to lower maintenance costs, improve operational efficiency and improve customer satisfaction. Rationalization today is mandatory to simplify and improve the way that financial institutions organize their daily busin

In his book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines “Black Swans” as random and rare events that underlie our lives and business, are nearly impossible to predict and have a huge impact when they materialize. According to Taleb, “Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence, rather than naively try to predict them.”

In the past several years, many large-scale events (similar in nature to Black Swans) have manifested and changed