Risk managers have been falling behind, forum hears

Risks have overtaken risk managers in the past 10 years, according to speakers and delegates at the Ferma forum

Risk managers haven't evolved at the same rate as the risks they have faced from the outside world in the past 10 years, according to speakers and delegates at the Federation of European Risk Management Associations (Ferma) forum in Stockholm.

"We have been muddling on," says Arnout van der Veer, chief risk officer at data provider Reed Elsevier. "We're changing but fairly gradually. We need to accelerate and get up to the next level pretty quickly."

Paul Taylor, president of the London-based Airmic association of insurers and risk managers and director of risk assurance at technology firm Morgan Crucible, expands: "The role of insurable risk management hasn't changed – what has changed is the risks that they're involved in. The role of a broader, strategic enterprise risk management has evolved over the past 10 years, simply because boards of companies – the senior executives – have suddenly realised that they need to actually manage the downside risk of their business in a better way."

But risk managers' hopes of being involved from the start in the development of corporate strategy may not be realised, another delegate says.

"I think you'll never be invited to that table," says Chris Lajtha, owner of risk management resource Adageo, based in France. "If you're going to be involved in developing the corporate strategy, you're going to be, or will have been invited to be, a senior executive manager on the team or a board member."

Understanding the strategy and supporting it with intelligent risk-reward analysis is absolutely vital, according to Lajtha. The risk management function has a key role to play in executing and challenging the strategy but to be the architect of strategy is a "jump too far", he says.