Overview
Risk management practice is changing at a faster pace than ever, with increasing board-level scrutiny, shareholder pressure, and regulatory focus. In this track we explore how risk management best practice may evolve over the next decade, and the issues that could drive changes in governance management. How might the regulatory landscape change? Which issues are likely to be drivers of new changes in shareholder activism and consumer pressure? How might the litigation landscape change the management of liability risk in organisations?
At a glance: the decade in governance and regulatory risk
2010: Basel III regulations are introduced with updated stress tests for banks, aiming to enhance the banking regulatory framework.
2015: The General Data Protection Regulation law comes into effect in the European Union.
2015: Modern Slavery Act of 2015 has a provision titled ‘Transparency in Supply Chains’ that requires UK corporates to report on the actions taken to eliminate slavery and human trafficking from their global supply chains.
2017: The UK government enacts the Gender Pay Gap Reporting Regulations, requiring all corporates over 250 employees to report on gender pay gap statistics.
2018: Elon Musk’s assertions on Twitter regarding the conditions by which Tesla will become a private company lead to a governance change at the firm, required by the SEC.
2018: In protest against the company’s handling of sexual harassment claims, Google staff stage a global walkout.
2019: The UK’s Financial Reporting Council introduces requirements for better reporting on principal and emerging risks by UK companies.
2019: Asda employees win a landmark equal pay ruling.
Ongoing: Multi-District Litigation (MDL) Opioid litigation targets the entire US pharmaceutical supply chain Chair.
Speakers
Chair
Michelle Tuveson
Executive Director, Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies
Michelle Tuveson is a Founder and Executive Director at the Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies hosted at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. Her responsibilities include the overall executive leadership at the Centre. This includes developing partnership relationships with corporations, governments, and other academic centres.
Discussant
Dr Simon Learmount
Lecturer in Corporate Governance, Cambridge Judge Business School
Dr Learmount has been Director of Operations at Saxoncourt, and Director of Sales and Marketing at International Packaging. In 1998 he was awarded a Shimomura Fellowship at the Development Bank of Japan. Simon is a member of the Cambridge Corporate Governance Network.
Presentations
Jennifer Copic
Regulatory and Liability Risk Research Lead, Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies
Jennifer supports the research on scenario stress test development and insurance loss estimation, specifically on emerging topics, such as Cyber.
Governance and Regulatory Risks – Centre for Risk Studies Risk Outlook
An overview of the research work carried out by Centre for Risk Studies for the risk class of Governance and Regulatory Risks, and description of a possible landscape of the risk over the next decade.
Clare Williams
Director of Reputation Management, Barclays
Clare Williams is Head of Reputation Risk Management at Barclays. Reputation Risk is one of Barclays’ eight Principal Risks, with the unit sitting in the first line of defence within the Corporate Relations team, acting as subject matter experts.
Clare has worked for Barclays since 2007, joining as Head of Corporate Communications Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong. She performed this role until 2015, when she took on responsibility for Diversity & Inclusion and Citizenship programmes in the region, before moving to London in 2016 to assume her reputation risk role.
Prior to joining Barclays, Clare was Head of European Communications at Nomura, based in London. She has previously held financial services communications roles at Credit Agricole and HSBC/Samuel Montagu. Before embarking on her corporate communications career, Clare worked in the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office with postings to Paris, Moscow and Mexico City; in her final two years in the FCO she worked in the Foreign Secretary’s Private Office. After leaving the FCO she worked for a year in the family office of an Omani businessman and diplomat.
Clare is on the advisory panel of Soulful Enterprise, and is an alumna of the Hong Kong University/Meraki Executive Search “Women’s Directorship Programme”.
Managing Reputational Risks: The Future Landscape
This presentation takes as it starting point the findings from two recently published pieces of research: firstly, the 2018 Centre for Risk Studies “Risk Management Perspectives of Global Corporations” Enterprise Risk Management survey which ranked reputation/brand as the fourth risk facing companies; and secondly, the 2019 ReputationInc/EACD report “The Future of Reputation Risk”. This second report identified the effective management of future reputation risk as being the number one risk amongst respondents.
Increasing regulatory scrutiny of how boards and the C-suite are considering reputational risks is just one of the drivers forcing organisations to contemplate how best to implement reputation risk governance.
With no global standardised reputational risk framework from which to start, and with the nature of reputational risk constantly evolving and dependent on numerous influences, consideration is given to the key elements of a robust, future proof governance model. Can such models provide the degree of flexibility required to identify, manage and mitigate emerging risks, or is a combination of governance (third and second line of defence) and subject matter expertise (first line) the sustainable way forward, whilst meeting regulatory expectations?
Rainer Sachs
Senior Risk Researcher, Sachs-Institut and International Risk Governance Council
Dr Rainer Sachs is an independent senior risk researcher and risk management expert.
Until recently he was heading innovation risk management at Munich Re’s Integrated Risk Management division. This includes risk assessments of corporate venture capital investments and the development of risk governance for innovation initiatives in Munich Re’s global business operations.
He was founder and head of the Emerging Risks and Reporting team, developing risk identification and assessment tools for emerging risks, accumulation scenarios and systemic risks. In addition, he was also responsible for the production and publication of internal and external risk reports.
During his almost 20-year career in the financial industry, he has held various positions in financial and insurance risk management, both in Germany and Australia.
Rainer Sachs’s current research interests focus on modelling complex risks in insurance and the human factor in decisions under uncertainty. A main objective of his work is the transfer of research results into risk management practices. He initiated and managed research programmes between Munich Re and Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität Munich (Department of Psychology) and the University of Cambridge (Centre for Risk Studies).
He is speaker and trainer at 100+ internal and external conferences, to clients and supervisory authorities.
Rainer Sachs holds a PhD in complex systems theory from Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität Munich/Max-Planck-Institute for extraterrestrial Physics and a Master in cosmology from the Technical University of Munich/University of Pune (India).
Working Towards a More Resilient Economy and Society
Today’s risk landscape is already characterised by an increasing complexity and interconnectedness. We are convinced this will become more prominent in the future.
Interconnected systems trigger the development of systemic risks. There is extensive description and characterisation of systemic risk, but few pragmatic solutions exist on how to understand, model and manage them. There is currently a lack of common agreement on how to deal with interconnected risks and cascading failures between systems. We illustrate properties of systemic risks by way of examples, eg critical infrastructures, climate change.
The development of resilience as an additional tool to cope with unexpected disruptions and systemic risks is an opportunity for risk management, both in research and its applications in corporations. Resilience is generally defined as a system’s ability to cope with unexpected, adverse events that cannot be prevented ex ante and can potentially lead to significant disruptions in its functionality. Managing resilience complements and includes risk management. They are considered two different approaches that address the unexpected threat of losses, both physical and financial, both events and trends.
Corporations will have to adapt to the new environment. Resilience-driven strategies aim at reducing the losses resulting from complexity by considering the consequences of unknown, uncertain, and unexpected events that impact systems rather than individual components. The insurance industry has always had an important part in risk management and the transfer of risk. In this presentation we demonstrate the role of insurance for strengthening resilience.
The work that will be presented is based on on-going work on systemic risks organised by the International Risk Governance Center at EPFL, and on its work for the EC funded SmartResilience Horizon 2020 project, focusing on resilience and insurance of CI.