George Williams
Risk Advisory Partner
Modern businesses must address an array of risks: global health, technological and digital disruption, political instability and change, macro-economic headwinds and climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that even smaller businesses must consider measured and calculated responses to these global risks and their potential impact. No organisation is immune from black swan events.
With in-depth experience across a wide range of industry sectors, BDO’s risk assurance and advisory experts can assist in building your organisation’s capacity to identify and resolve threats. We deliver clear and practical risk solutions that can help to increase the resilience and competitiveness of your business, in turn increasing risk management performance and, ultimately, profitability.
Taking a holistic yet customised proactive approach that addresses all aspects of your business’s strategic and operational risks, our enterprise risk management (ERM) services can help you with:
- ISO 31000:2018 / COSO 2017 and KING IV benchmark assessments
- Development of ERM frameworks
- Development of materiality/risk appetite frameworks
- Risk workshops
- Full outsourced ERM function to:
- Implement formal risk management strategies, frameworks, policies and processes (including risk appetite statements)
- Identify key enterprise-wide and operational risks
- Evaluate existing risk control strategies
- Develop agreed high-level action plans for residual risk mitigation
- Develop management tools to document, register, monitor and report risks identified in the risk management frameworks and processes
- Provide board and risk committee oversight, assurance and advice
- Independent assurance on the risk management function (in terms of the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) standards)
- Risk maturity assessments
- Assurance maps
- Training
- Root cause analysis.
Managing risk in a dynamic, agile way enables businesses to survive, enhances their resilience and positions them to take advantage of new opportunities. When considering life after COVID-19, businesses need to think about risk in numerous areas, from impacts on the business model and supply chain, through to fraud exposure and cyber security. Being alert to the opportunities that change presents is essential, now that new, smarter ways of working have been tried and tested.
Integrated ERM solutions
BDO’s comprehensive, integrated and modular software allows companies to meet all the challenges of risk management, internal control and auditing. The BDO ERM system can identify, assess and evaluate risks, map controls, capture assurances and track actions.
Risk management frameworks
BDO will establish a dynamic ERM framework based on ISO 31000:2018 and COSO (2017), integrating strategy, performance and King IV requirements to suit your organisation’s needs.
Assurance maps
Another key element of ERM is the adoption of ‘assurance maps’ to articulate how well your organisation is managing risk. An ‘assurance map’ consolidates evidence from internal and external assurance providers to help assess what areas might have been overlooked.
Risk appetite statements
As organisational risk appetites mature, the importance of having strategic risk conversations grows, the benefit being the fostering of an organisational culture that supports the overall risk appetite journey. The benefits derived from fostering a risk appetite culture throughout the organisation also paves the way for other benefits, such as improvements in the speed and effectiveness of risk/return decision-making, as well as more efficient reporting against risk profile, benchmarks and appetite.
Risk identification and evaluation
BDO professionals can provide tailored expert advice to help organisations identify, assess and evaluate the risks they are exposed to and put in place appropriate mitigation measures to try to prevent the worst-case scenarios becoming a reality.
Awareness training
BDO risk management specialists can provide mentoring, coaching and training to meet the individual needs of an organisation, from small practical workshops to large company-wide presentations and e-learning.
