Risk Management Experts Discuss the COVID-19 Pandemic and its Impacts on Risk Management, Resilience and Business Continuity

From ContinuityCentral.com:

In an interview-style article, experts from the Institute of Operational Risk and Institute of Risk Management discuss COVID-19 and how the risk management profession is reacting.

Participants: Carolyn Williams, CMIRM, Director of Corporate Relations, Institute of Risk Management and Dr Jimi Hinchliffe, SIRM, Chairman, England and Wales Chapter Institute of Operational Risk.

Question: Is the coronavirus likely to mark a turning point for the risk management profession?

Dr Jimi Hinchliffe

Yes, in so far as this is the latest iteration of a known virus that could recur or mutate in the future i.e. it may not just be a one-off risk that will go away.

Business continuity and crisis management are a major focus for financial firms and have been brought into even greater focus by global regulators attention on operational resilience. COVID-19 is providing a real test of organizations’ business continuity management arrangements and continuity planning and is keeping continuity specialists, operational risk managers and Boards extremely busy. A core principle of risk management is to learn from experience and improve, and I am sure that there will be lessons from the experiences of dealing with the challenges of COVID-19 which will result in improved resilience and better risk management.

Carolyn Williams

It certainly seems like coronavirus will prove to be a landmark in how countries, organizations and individuals deal with external strategic risks, in the same way as 9/11 or the global financial crisis.  We will be talking about this for years to come, not so much in relation to the physical nature of the illness, but more in terms of the highly disruptive measures that are being taken to reduce the spread of the virus. And at the current time, we still don’t know the full extent of those measures, or their second order impacts as organizations are hit by the restrictions, revenues are impacted and economic growth curtailed. Organizations like the World Economic Forum have had pandemic on their lists of top global risks  for a long time, so no one should really claim to be surprised – it’s not a Black Swan, in its strictest sense, although having a resilient organization will still prove to be the best defence.

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