Financial services risk and regulation

Financial institutions which lend to businesses must understand and manage their exposure to natural capital risk.

Overview

Financial services firms are facing more complex regulations and greater risks than ever before. Risk management has never been higher on our clients' agendas, and regulatory compliance and alignment to emerging risk management practices are seen as imperatives by each of the large banks and insurers.

Risk- and regulatory-driven change programmes continue to intensify, and there are no signs of this trend abating in the short to medium terms. While many see this large-scale change as a problem, we see it as an opportunity – an opportunity to shine, to grow and to build trust.

We work with our clients to redefine the way risk and regulation is seen and actively embrace change as a powerful way to enhance their reputation, secure long-term growth and sustainable profits, and deliver value to customers. We aim to leave our clients with:

Confidence

In an evolving and regulatory landscape clients require a robust and coherent response with effective supporting processes. We advise and support them to assess, design and implement the processes, controls and systems to make their business more resilient in order to drive reliable and effective outcomes.

Clarity

Prioritising between strategic initiatives, regulatory compliance and managing current and evolving risks can be complex. We can assist them to navigate through this complexity and provide clarity on the path towards achieving each of these objectives in a sustainable manner.

Insight

Risk functions have at times struggled to demonstrate the value added tot the business. With our support, tools and techniques they can develop the forward looking, risk-aware insights required to support their key business decisions.

Some of the largest areas of change we are currently supporting our clients with include:

Enterprise risk management:

We assist with the design and implementation of the overarching frameworks, policies and processes for the identification, measurement, monitoring, management and reporting of all qualitative and quantitative risks to which an entity is exposed.

Credit risk:

The biggest current driver of change in credit risk is the implementation of IFRS 9, where we assist with accounting policy, control and process reviews and with credit model development and validation.

Operational risk:

We are helping organisations develop cohesive and comprehensive approaches to managing the resilience of their organisation by developing proactive, end-to-end risk management approaches which prevent or reduce the impact of process and control failures.

Stress testing and balance sheet management:

Due to the increasing expectations from regulators for financial services firms to fully understand the potential impact of macroeconomic stress on their organisation, several have implemented enhancement programmes to develop this capability further. We are assisting them to define this target state and to develop the required stress-testing techniques and processes.

Conduct and culture:

Financial services organisations are coming under increasing pressure from regulators and society at large to demonstrate that they deliver fair customer outcomes over the full product lifecycle. We are working with them on enhancing their fair market conduct policies, processes and procedures.

Risk data and reporting:

We are helping our clients come to grips with new global regulations which have raised the bar significantly for the standard of controls applied over risk-related data with the aim of ensuring the robustness of information informing a bank’s most important risk management decisions.