Today’s rapidly changing business operational and regulatory environment requires thinking about interconnected and intertwined risks in new ways. Increasingly, businesses are turning to good governance to reap the wider benefits that it brings by developing their governance to become more efficient and effective in managing their business compliance, risks and opportunities. The ever evolving and increasingly competitive environment in which many organisations today work means that traditional risk management practices may be insufficient. This is particularly true in highly regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications, mining and healthcare, but the extensive scope and impact of regulatory compliance is not limited to these organisations.
Gaining a clear view and understanding of your risk and regulatory environment and its unique nuances and then putting in place strategies and technology solutions to mitigate negative impact is key to ensuring an organisation’s sustainable business growth, competitive advantage, enhanced shareholder confidence and delivering value to customers.
At PwC, we work with you to redefine the way risk and regulation is seen. With our help, you won’t just navigate around potential problems, you’ll also be positioned to get ahead. Our strategy is to ensure that the identification of risk is an opportunity to prepare, respond and emerge stronger. Together, we can develop and help you to implement transparent and compelling business strategies that customers, regulators, employees and stakeholders will buy into. By adding our skills, experience and expertise to yours, your business can stand out for the right reasons.
An ever-evolving risk and regulatory landscape requires a robust and coherent response with effective supporting processes. We can advise and support you to assess, design and implement the processes, controls and systems to make your business more resilient in order to drive reliable and effective outcomes.
Prioritising between strategic initiatives, regulatory compliance and managing current and evolving risks can be complex. We can assist you to navigate through this complexity and provide clarity on the path towards achieving each of these objectives in a sustainable manner.
Risk, control and compliance functions have at times struggled to demonstrate the value added to the business. With our support, tools and techniques you can develop the risk-aware insights required to support your key business decisions.
We assist with the design and implementation of the overarching frameworks, policies and processes for the identification, assessment, management, monitoring and reporting all qualitative and quantitative risks to which an entity is exposed. This includes the development of a cohesive and proactive approach to end-to-end risk management which is focussed on preventing or reducing the impact of operational process and control failures.
Despite the significant investments to date, risk and regulatory driven change programmes continue to intensify and there is no sign of this trend abating. The effective and efficient management or risk and compliance relies on an organisation having the necessary people, processes, governance and technology in place. Whether it is regulatory change management, regulatory change embedment, regulatory engagement models or the approach adopted in relation to the day to day management of risk, it is clear that the risk and compliance functions of the future will require new skills and technology to improve their effectiveness and efficiency in order to ensure that they move from being perceived as cost centres to adding strategic value to their organisation. We work with organisations to ensure that they not only have the necessary governance in place to facilitate the end to end management of risk but that they their people have the necessary long-term skills and access to state of the art technology resources to support this transition throughout the risk management lifecycle.
We have extensive experience in assisting clients who wish to apply for a license within the financial services industry in gaining a detailed understanding of the regulatory requirements and conditions placed on organisations and assessing their current ability to meet such requirements. We also have extensive experience in assisting clients in formulating their licensing applications to ensure that they are well placed to be successful in such applications.
Despite having made significant investments in their compliance functions, organisations continue to be hit by regulatory fines and sanctions as they grapple with overregulation and ineffective control environments. Addressing such failures often requires organisations to implement large remediation plans which require redeployment of scarce resources. We assist clients in ensuring that remediation projects are effectively and efficiently rolled out to meet any required regulatory deadlines and in a manner which focussed not only on ‘plugging’ the historical failures but also the proactive management of any underlying root causes going forward.
Whether it is money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, bribery and corruption, market abuse or insider trading, financial crime continues to be an increasing concern to organisations, and especially financial institutions world-wide. As regulators and financial authorities introduce new strategies to detect and prevent financial crime, criminals develop even more sophisticated methodologies to evade legal scrutiny and commit offences. Financial institutions are also expected to participate in the fight against financial crime, by ensuring compliance with the regulations that authorities put in place or face the risk of severe penalties. We have extensive experience in assisting clients in designing and implementing end to end risk management and compliance plans to address the risks of financial crime, identifying innovative, proactive and analytic-driven technology solutions to respond to financial crime, preparing for a regulatory inspection or in responding to an actual financial crime event.
Organisations are facing increasing pressure from both regulators and society at large to demonstrate that they demonstrate the necessary commitment to ethical conduct in everything they do and deliver fair stakeholder outcomes. We are well placed to assist clients in ensuring that their decisions and processes are undertaken with the necessary level of ethical governance (e.g. trustee elections) and to support clients in ensuring that there internal culture drives the right behaviours across all levels of the organisation (e.g. ethical conduct framework and culture assessments, sentiment analysis and management). Within financial services in particular we assist clients to ensure that they take the necessary steps to enhance their fair market conduct policies, processes and procedures throughout the product and customer lifecycle.
Organisations are facing escalating expectations from stakeholders, particularly regulators, to have a clear understanding the potential impact of various potential operational failures, unexpected crises (e.g. cyber breaches, pandemics) and macroeconomic stresses on their organisation. Several have implemented enhancement programmes to develop this capability further but wish to ensure that they stand up to scrutiny should any of these risks eventuate. PwC has extensive experience in assisting clients to run simulated crisis events based on plausible scenarios thereby allowing them to test their end to end ability to effectively respond to such risks in a ‘real-life’ environment.
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Kerin Wood
Partner | Risk and Regulatory Platform, Advisory Services, PwC South Africa
Tel: +27 (0) 11 797 5246
