How often has an executive, or the risk committee or the board requested that the risk function present to them the “top risks” for the year ahead, the “risk landscape”, the “key business concerns”, the “top 10 issues” which could affect the firm?
Such a request is typically followed by the most junior member of the risk team being assigned the task of scouring the web to find any industry publications, perhaps accompanied by some form of internal management survey to supplement the public reports with something specific to the firm itself.
Finally, a “top risks” report is provided to the requesting body, who will review it, perhaps suggest some specific action, then move on to the next agenda item, the top risks forgotten until next year – tick that box.
The concept of a horizon scan to identify not so much specific risks, but more probably industry causal factors and industry concerns which may have an adverse or unexpected impact on the firm is actually a sound component of the firm’s risk awareness and risk culture development activities.
By researching public industry views, most often published by consultancies, solution vendors and service providers, the firm is gaining access to third-party, hopefully informed, intelligence. By getting internal views from a mix of subject matter experts and different levels of management, the firm is including its own unique and mission-oriented thinking into the pot. But, how much more valuable could this intelligence be if the firm shared its own internal views with its peers in the industry and them was able to access and use anonymised peer “top risk” benchmarks?
Suddenly, what was most probably a tick box exercise could start to add real value, not by regurgitating what others have written, but by considering actual benchmarks provided by peers, actual intelligence built off diverse inputs and consensus.
Perhaps the requesting body will invest more than just a passing thought when presented with such intelligence….
