Peter Deans, consultant and former Bank of Queensland Chief Risk Officer, visits FRT to discuss his newly-published ’52 Risks’ framework, and to how this relates to the scenarios of a pandemic and digital transformation.

Peter highlights the need to keep a holistic view of all risks, and avoid what might be a natural bias to quantify, which might inadvertently skew emphasis away from particular risk types. He identifies these as key learnings in how the Risk function can educate and provide reporting to boards.

He also stresses the need to ensure operations are versatile, for instance across data centers and call centers, as a key learning from the COVID-19 experience so far. In this context, Peter identifies the use of Cloud as a key enabler, but that it should be thought of as a feature of firms that have been planning and enabling such versatility, rather than as an end-product in itself. Peter also foreshadows COVID-19 as prompting some firms to re-assess their strategies in outsourcing, as opposed to building capabilities.