Rich Cooper is Global Head of Financial Service Go-To-Market at Fusion Risk Management.
What were the key theme(s) for your business in 2022?
2022 was the year of ongoing and compound crises that significantly affected organizations’ ability to conduct business as usual. Organizations faced numerous disruptions, including global political instability, war, increased cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions, pandemic lockdowns, increasingly frequent and severe climate incidents, inflation, recession, and more.
Firms essentially learned that if you can dream it, it can happen. As the risk landscape continues to evolve, there is no longer a situation that should be deemed too “ridiculous” and implausible to prepare for. Now that the impossible is possible, businesses are looking to strengthen their resilience by running scenario tests on both plausible and implausible severe scenarios to bolster their resilience.
What are your clients’ pain points and how have they changed from 1 year ago?
Our customers continue to experience pressure to demonstrate operational resilience while balancing increasingly stringent regulatory requirements around the world for operational resilience and key technology areas like third-party risk and cyber resilience. Regulators continue to enact new regulations to protect the integrity of critical infrastructure industries such as financial services. On top of these regulations, businesses are faced with increasing pressure from key stakeholders and board members to demonstrate and deliver on operational resilience.
As a result of this heightened pressure, customers are looking for ways to better leverage data and operational intelligence to make decisions, share information with boards and executives, and meet Global regulatory requirements.
What trends are getting underway that people may not know about but will be important?
Leading organizations are looking at staying ahead of threat intelligence to learn what risks are on the horizon that may impact their business. This is both internal data such as KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) on technology platforms and 3rd party as well as external data like Geopolitical data like weather, covid and or political tensions. For example, one risk that we are closely monitoring – and advising our customers with services in the region to do the same – is the increasing geopolitical tensions between China and Taiwan. This is a region that is already experiencing prolonged COVID related impacts so if we layer a Geopolitical event on top of that we have was is called a MIS (Multiple Event Simultaneously) which can lead to more severe impacts to the available local workforce and supply chain. The reality of MIS scenario planning is a best practice we expect to see maturing in 2023
Firms should stay abreast of these potential disruptions and take the necessary proactive steps to ensure minimum disruption to business as usual should a significant disruptive event occur.
