Evidence-based Problem Solving for Manging Risk
As a senior manager or risk manager, you face many challenges that can potentially derail important objectives and put your organisation at risk. Whether it’s
Virtual Risk Officer
Do you need a highly capable, experienced and strategic thinking risk advisor to work with your leadership team but want to stay ‘lean and mean’ ?
InConsult provides you with realistic and value for money options to help strengthen your risk management capabilities.
What is a Virtual Risk Officer?
A Virtual Risk Officer is an experienced risk professional who is available on demand or at pre-agreed times, to help you make more informed strategic and tactical decisions that involve risk and uncertainty.
A Virtual Risk Officer is part of your team and provides strategic and decision making guidance. They gain a sound understanding of your business, environment and strategy and encourage you to take risk, but within the boundaries of your risk capacity, appetite and tolerances.
Our skilled and professional Virtual Risk Officers work across a number of sectors and a diverse portfolio of small to medium sized clients who cannot yet justify a full-time Risk Officer or a formal risk management function, but they value the risk management advice, experience and support they receive.
You have 4 Virtual Risk Officer options to choose from. The level of support is determined by you. It can range from periodic risk mentoring and on-demand advice to a more structured, integrated and proactive Virtual Chief Risk Officer option.
What are the Options Available?
Risk Mentor
Risk mentoring is delivered on a one-to-one or team basis via scheduled periodic meetings to help fill any risk capability or risk leadership gaps.
It is designed to provide the governing body, CEO and leadership team with a sounding board to discuss important risk matters. Your risk mentor can:
- Discuss and monitor the top 5 or 20 risks
- Identify emerging risks/ potential blind spots
- Advise on control design and risk treatments
- Support new strategic initiatives
- Help make better and more informed decisions involving uncertainty
- Align critical decisions to risk appetite and tolerance thresholds
In addition, you have on-call support for business-critical issues that arise in-between scheduled meetings.
Risk Mentor is ideal for new start-ups, when a stakeholder/regulator requires more risk management attention or when there is a major change in business strategy that requires strengthening your risk management capabilities.
Risk mentoring is also available to newly appointed Risk Managers working in a new or challenging environment who needs a little support and guidance from an experienced risk professional.
Virtual Risk Officer (Lite)
Although your risk management requirements grow, it may still not be financially feasible to employ a full-time Risk Officer.
Our Virtual Risk Officer (Lite) is designed to provide a more formal and proactive risk management approach to support your needs. Your Virtual Risk Officer can:
- Design a formal risk management framework
- Support the implementation of the framework
- Implement an annual work plan
- Conduct a series of risk workshops to identify risks
- Build internal risk management capabilities
- Help management design effective controls
- Provide periodic risk status reports
- Liaise with the regulator on all risk management matters
- Meet regularly with the leadership team
Whilst this option is ‘lite’, it is tailored to your requirements, designed to achieve maximum effectiveness at minimum cost, encourage strategic and operational risk thinking and minimise the risk of surprises.
This option is perfect for small to medium sized organisations (small cap listed companies and not-for profits) that have mandated risk management requirements and/or more complex risk management requirements that demand a specialist risk resource.
Virtual Chief Risk Officer
Our Virtual Chief Risk Officer service is designed to provide risk management leadership and direction to the governing body, CEO and leadership team.
It provides your organisation with a designated Chief Risk Officer, formal position description and a more wholistic risk management function that is appropriate to your needs.
The Virtual Chief Risk Officer can perform the activities of a Risk Mentor and Virtual Risk Officer (Lite), but typically the scope is wider and frequency is higher due to needs and complexity of your organisation. Some of the additional activities may include:
- Aligning risk management to strategic plan
- Defining and monitoring the risk culture
- Embed risk management in day-to-day processes
- Supporting risk related activities – cyber risk, climate risk, fraud and corruption, compliance, third party risk etc
- Supporting resilience initiatives – business continuity, contingency planning, crisis management etc
- Performing scenario analysis and what-if exercises
Our involvement is integrated into the business to support management decisions involving material risks.
This option is suitable for smaller APRA regulated entities, medium to large not-for profit and ASX listed companies who want to strengthen risk management to enhance risk governance and achieve their objectives,
Interim Risk Officer
Recruiting the right risk professional can take time. Your risks won’t take a break, you need to keep going, you can’t stop progress.
Our Interim Risk Officer provides you with a short to medium term solution to provide you some time to recruit the best possible person you can. The activities will be specific to each client.
Your Interim Risk Officer will be a highly qualified professional and experienced individual. They will quickly gain the confidence of the governing body and management to continue with your risk management program. If required, the Interim Risk Officer can also make enhancements to the risk management framework.
The Interim Risk Officer will also be available to assist in the recruitment and selection of a new Chief Risk Officer and ensure a smooth handover.
The Value of a Virtual Risk Officer
- Assists the board/ governing body establish how the CEO, management and staff view and take risks.
- Helps to develop an appropriate risk culture, encouraging desired behaviours such as speaking up and learning from mistakes.
- Encourages and develops rigorous processes to support appropriate risk taking.
- Establishes effective governance structures to identify and manage risks.
- Builds the desired level of risk management maturity that reflects the entity’s risk profile.
- Enhances risk oversight, debate and builds capabilities, but does not own the risks.
- Facilitates innovation and brainstorming sessions that support risk taking.
- Applies risk management insight to key decisions, guiding and influencing risk based decisions that may impact the achievement of objectives.
- Monitors the organisations dynamic and constantly changing operating environment.
- Ensures a consistent approach to risk management to support robust decision making.
- Builds organisational resilience by planning for a range of plausible disruption scenarios.
- Enhances stakeholder trust and confidence.
7 Benefits Of Our
Virtual Risk Officer
1. Experienced Risk Professional
We provide you with a dedicated Risk Officer who is an experienced risk professional to support and guide the governing body, leadership team and management when making critical business decisions. Your Virtual Risk Officers will have over 20 years experience in risk management and senior management positions.
2. Immediate Start
Your Risk Officer is ready to start, almost immediately and will hit the ground running after an initial brief. Your Virtual Risk Officer will conduct a Needs Analysis, meet with key executives and draft an Action Plan to get things done.
3. Work Remotely or On-Site
Virtual does not mean all interactions are web-based. It means flexibility to work how you want us to. We are a Microsoft Certified Partner, we can work remotely from anywhere and use our GuardianERM.Net web based risk management software that allows efficient recording, monitoring, sharing and reporting of risk and incident data.
4. You Stay Focused
After an initial brief, you can stay focused on your business. We will concentrate on delivering a proactive and structured risk management program to help you achieve your objectives. You gain from our professional approach, independence and extensive business experience.
5. Access Our Expert Team
In addition to a dedicated Risk Officer who will support your operational and strategic risks, you will have access to a multi-disciplinary team of risk experts covering other specialised areas like cyber security, vendor risk, climate risk, ESG, compliance, project risk, business continuity, emergency management, crisis management, fraud prevention and more.
6. Cost Effective
No recruitment fees and no payroll related on-costs or liabilities.
You choose the level of service you need, and we design a tailored solution to meet your needs. You have access a Risk Officer with premium skills and experience at a significantly lower cost than hiring full-time.
7. Scalable
Start with a basic Risk Mentoring program and scale up to a Virtual Chief Risk Officer program at your own pace, when the business needs grow and risk management needs mature to align to your risk taking and strategy.
Who Needs a Virtual Risk Officer?
- Small to medium sized businesses with annual turnover between $1M and $150M.
- Not-for-profit organisations that need a quality risk advisor from time-to-time to support the board and management, but have limited funds.
- Start-ups looking to raise funds and/or list on on a stock exchange.
- Small to medium sized listed companies about to undergo major transformation or need to enhance their risk management framework.
- Organisations that are undertaking major projects and/or strategies which may be inherently high risk.
- Local branches of multi-nationals requiring local presence to support formal and proactive risk management.
- Organisations operating in a highly complex environment.
- Organisations required to have a formal risk management function, formal risk assessments, and/or a dedicated Chief Risk Officer.
What our clients say
“Our Framework is now very comprehensive and effectively embeds the assessment, management and control of risk at all levels within our organisation, which was our key objective in commissioning our Risk Review.”
- Housing Association, Compliance Manager
“Engaging InConsult proved to be an excellent choice. The knowledge and experience of their consultant made the whole process effortless. The recommendations from the assessment were independent, thoughtful, and relevant.”
- Health Insurance, CIO
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