“I believe risk managers are among the professionals who contribute discretely but with passion”

What are your highlights as president?

Looking back at Ferma’s activities, I was pleasantly surprised at how much we have achieved during my four-year tenure as president. When I became president in 2015, Ferma had not long launched rimap, the first European certification programme in risk management. Naturally, we experienced challenges during our journey to bring this qualification to fruition. But I am very proud to announce that 173 risk managers have been certified and have successfully completed the rimap qualification – and the numbers continue to grow.

On policies and lobbying, Ferma is a key advisor to the European Commission and OECD on topics such as cyber risk, captives and environmental liability. We have renewed our membership with EIOPA, the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority and remain the only representative of the corporate insurance buying community.

What were your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?

Ferma needed to strengthen its relationships with member associations, as almost any federation needs to do periodically. After a review of the fundamentals of Ferma’s goals, we adopted a vision and strategy plan at the general assembly in June 2016. Since then, we have made significant strides in our efforts to embed risk management to the business model and culture of European organisations.

We have also increased involvement with our member associations, shaping our events in response to their feedback. It is also important to us that our events are accessible and so we have made registration to this year’s forum free of charge for risk managers.

On our Seminar, we restructured it in 2018 to provide a learning experience. In doing so, we focused on two priority topics: cyber risks and sustainability. For the first time, we published a practical report on each topic to give risk managers guidelines that they could use with colleagues and senior management.

How are you preparing risk managers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

As an organisation at the heart of Europe, we have taken our leadership role seriously. Our working group on artificial intelligence (AI) examines the potential value of AI in improving ERM. It aims to help risk managers position themselves as key advisors to senior management on the opportunities and challenges of AI technologies, including ethical implications.

With members’ feedback at the core, we have outlined our proposals on AI and have communicated this to the European Commission.

And yesterday during the first day of the forum, we published an important study: Artificial intelligence applied to risk management. I believe it is the first work of its kind. In 2018, we published Preparing for cyber insurance, a guide for organisations to get the best from the cyber insurance market. We worked with organisation who represent insurance intermediaries –the BIPAR, Insurance Europe – and insurance brokers themselves, namely

Aon and Marsh. We also published two editions of a guide to cyber risk governance, which we produced in partnership with ECIIA, the European organisation of internal auditors.

We noticed that sustainability and Solvency II were priorities during your tenure. What progress have you made here?

Sustainability in relation to EU non-financial reporting requirements is very important to our members and so we provided our comments to the Commission’s guidelines on how business should report climate-related information. Ferma continues to contribute significantly to the discussion of Solvency II, especially regarding a more consistent application of the proportionality principle to captive insurance companies.

While your time as president has been successful, do you have any regrets?

Of course, anyone leaving office after four important years will also have regrets. One of mine is that I will not be so actively involved in the work that Ferma is currently doing to ensurethat risk management achieves its full potential. I believe that risk managers are among the professionals who contribute discretely but with passion to the success of our organisations and the future of Europe.