Achieving integrated risk management

For the past number of years, AIRMIC has been working with the Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT) to establish a dialogue between the risk management and treasurer professions.

As part of the association’s latest initiative John Hawkins, principal, Mercer Human Resources Consulting and John Scott, strategic risk consultant, Zurich Risk Services will be giving a joint presentation today about how they work together across the functions of risk management and treasury.

David Gamble, former AIRMIC executive director and now head of Risk Publishing Online, the workshop’s moderator, commented: ‘The workshop is intended to get the message out about how other people have integrated risk management programmes. I think it will be helpful because people will start thinking about how they do it themselves and get new ideas, confidence that they are on the right track and probably an understanding of the complexities if they haven’t started out yet.’

‘It’s a great opportunity to ask other people how they deal with various problems that you may face in your own business,’ said Gamble.

He added that the risk manager and the treasurer have a whole series of areas where their jobs overlap. ‘The impact of the insurance policy,’ he said, ‘could have a serious effect on the cash-flow of the company. It might even affect the ability to pay a dividend and therefore the stock market standing of the company.’ At some point there has to be a linkage between the risk manager and the treasurer. ‘It happens to be one of the easier colleague to colleague communications,’ he added. ‘But quite honestly the risk manager should have the same sort of dialogue with the auditors and indeed with the health and safety people, HR and others if he is doing his job properly.’