Challenge
The main challenge of this mission was to be able to deliver results quickly to demonstrate to senior management the benefits of the exercise.
In this organisation, a portion of the senior management, coming from a non-regulated industry background, did not fully grasp the criticality of the regulatory pressure for financial activities. They tended to consider the risk management function as a cost rather than a value contributing activity.
This is why we were given the clear mandate to operate as efficiently as possible, to quickly demonstrate value and provide insights through the risk and control report to get buy in from the business lines.
In this mission, the history of the risk management function, the position of senior management and the particularly complex activities influenced the design of the RCA programme.
We had to factor in these constraints to decide how to segment the different parts of the firm to organise the RCA workshops. In parallel, we used information and lessons learned from incidents to gather insights on key risks and controls.
The RCA methodology for regulated financial entities is now well established. Based on our long experience in the domain, we use the best practice expected by regulators to assess risks and controls. Alongside a widely accepted methodology, our main value add was to understand the complexities of the activities to design an effective programme and engage constructively all parties to the project.
Reporting on our activities in our early results was very important to get accepted by the senior management. We applied a strict project management methodology with regular reporting on the progress made and our deliverables. We worked in collaboration with the risk team and the internal control team, keeping internal audit informed as well. Overall, the project was executed on time, sometimes even ahead of time, to the satisfaction of our client.
As a result, the client submitted the results of its RCA programme to the satisfaction of the regulators. This for a fraction of the time and cost it would have incurred if they did this alone.
