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RIMS NeXt Gen Forum Offers Insights for Rising Risk Professionals

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“We’re becoming numb to the news,” said risk management veteran and author Joseph Mayo. “We’ve seen a 1,200% increase in daily record loss in the last five years. Globalization has created faster-moving and infinitely more complex risks and that’s what we have to adapt to.

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In his keynote, “Don’t Tell Me What I Know, Tell Me What I Don’t Know,” at last week’s RIMS NeXt Gen Forum 2019 for rising risk professionals, Mayo discussed environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk events and how they will continue to impact the risk management community, noting that a 1,000% increase in ESG events has occurred from 2010 to 2018 compared to each of the three prior decades. 

(Hear a preview from his RIMScast interview.)

Despite flaws in actuarial approaches and the challenges surrounding artificial intelligence such as bias and adversarial machine learning, Mayo said that the profession’s outlook is “not all doom and gloom.”

“The future of risk management is to make decisions with incomplete, inaccurate and obfuscated information,” he said. “We will have to embrace fuzzy logic because decisions need to be made quicker.

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We no longer have decades to develop actuarial models.”

Shortly afterward, Robin Joines of Sedgwick and Kristy Coleman of Turner Broadcasting System hosted risk management “Jeopardy!” While not quite as fast-paced nor as well-funded as the long-running game show, the hosts provided a forum for discussion and debate on explored topics from business travel etiquette and travel risk to communication and corporate politics. Discussing the images people project when they cross their arms, for example, while many agreed that it projects rigidity, one audience member cited a recent Wired video that reported it could also be considered a method of self-soothing rather than hostility or reservation.

Joines and Coleman were open-minded in their scoring and even led a quick tongue twister that kept the atmosphere light and fun. “Final Jeopardy” focused on public speaking, offering some practical speech delivery tips that would benefit any professional. For example, Joines said, “Talk from your knowledge base, and not from your note cards, and you’ll come across as confident.”

The forum closed with “You are Your Brand – How to Distinguish Yourself in Your Career,” presented by Kathleen Crowe, chair of the RIMS Rising Risk Professionals Advisory Group, and Steve Pottle, RIMS vice president.

Despite their differences in age and experience, the duo explained how their careers followed similar patterns. Neither presenter had begun on a risk management track, with Pottle starting out as a budding Canadian radio personality and Crowe initially expecting to work for an incumbent U.S. senator. Taking career risks brought them into risk management, and they shared lessons from their respective journeys that ultimately influenced them to be active leaders in their organizations and the industry at large.

One key tip of theirs was planning a personal goal that aligns with a long-term strategy of an organization, which can be an early indicator of a transition to a leadership role. From there, they said, you can build your personal brand regardless of your industry.

“Your personal brand lies somewhere in between how you see yourself and how others see you,” Pottle said. 

Click here for more NeXt Gen Forum coverage on the “Legal Checklist for AI Risk.” 

Click here for “Key Takeaways from RIMS NeXt Gen Forum 2019,” a special RIMScast episode produced live from the event.

The Risky ‘Business of Art’ Explored at Observer Event

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From left: Massimo Sterpi, Elena Zavelev, Anne Bracegirdle, Devin Finzer, Curt Bilby / Photo: Keith Sherman & Associates

NEW YORK—On May 21, the Observer’s inaugural “Business of Art Observed” event brought experts in art, insurance, risk management, tech and finance to the Roosevelt Hotel to discuss established and emerging risks facing the $50 billion art industry.

The “Insurance and Risk Management” session wasted no time exploring creative risk and claims management approaches to the various forms of potential damage to artwork. From transit to security to geopolitical risk, panelists agreed fine art coverage is not a paint-by-numbers process, and said the “framing of a claim” can facilitate a payment.

“Insurance companies get a bad reputation,” said Mary Pontillo, senior vice president and national fine art practice leader at DeWitt Stern. “But the higher-end, really good-quality insurance companies are looking for ways to pay claims. I think that’s where there are a lot of misconceptions.”

For example, she mentioned advising a client whose work was being kept on a yacht. While certain maritime and environmental risks such as humidity were not covered by the policy, she was able to demonstrate that ocean spray had been the source of the damage and successfully get the claim covered.

The session discussed modernizing risk management in the art market and how the industry should apply forensic due diligence to transactions and ensure they view all business activities through a lens of strategic risk. And with transparency cited as a continuous challenge, Dennis Wade, a senior partner at Wade Clark Mulcahy, LLP, who has handled international fine art matters, pointed out the importance of reputation risk when drafting a policy.

“Many policies also contain an exclusion for the dishonesty of the person to whom you deliver or entrust the goods,” Wade said. “So if you consign a work to a corrupt gallerist, there may be an exclusion in your policy and you may not be covered at all.”

The emergence of blockchain technology dominated discussion at another session, “Art Market 2.0: Using Art & Technology to Drive the Industry Forward.” According to panelists, authentication and secure transactions have risen to the top of their risk registers. New Art Academy Founder Elena Zavelev said blockchain’s ability to put individual faces on digital artwork has mostly solved the prior risk of unauthorized duplications, forgeries, and fraud. Zavelev and her co-panelists said blockchain may facilitate a long-term change in the way art is created, sold, curated and insured by improving the ability to track a work’s provenance.

Christie’s AVP Anne Bracegirdle said the masterstroke for streamlining the authentication process is to create a digital, industry-wide registry. Tokenizing original works, she said, would simplify the experience of buying, selling and trading. “If each piece had its own digital identity that would stay the same, no matter where it went, it would instantly provide secure provenance and prices,” Bracegirdle said. “There are companies like Consensus and Microsoft working to create distributed identity networks. The security within that could be applied to scale blockchain—regardless of which blockchain you’re interacting with. Digital identities would provide clients with access to all their consignments and their purchases in one consolidated space, which currently doesn’t exist.”

The evolution of art was also a hot topic during this session since what’s considered a “finished piece” is no longer just a physical canvas. Digital, virtual and even crypto-art may be in their relative infancy but these are gaining global popularity and could significantly influence the industry, said Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, a peer-to-peer marketplace for crypto collectibles, gaming items, and digital art.   

“[Owning digital products] has always been confined to a specific ecosystem, like event tickets to a ticketing site,” Finzer said. “Blockchain offers a new type of ownership for these digital assets and it’s exciting for digital art because you can own it in a variety of [digital forms]. Right now, we see the enthusiasm is from tech enthusiasts, but I think over time these ideas around digital ownership will cross over to a mainstream crowd who appreciate the art more than the technology.”

Q&A: 2019 Risk Manager of the Year Luke Figora

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Luke Figora, senior associate vice president and chief risk and compliance officer at Northwestern University, was named the RIMS 2019 Risk Manager of the Year today.

With annual revenues of approximately .

5 billion (reported in 2018) and nearly $700 million in sponsored research annually, Northwestern is among the country’s leading research universities. Figora has risen quickly through the ranks at Northwestern, where his enterprise risk management (ERM) framework has elevated its risk culture across three campuses—two in Illinois and one in Qatar.

Figora spoke with Risk Management Monitor about his experience as one of the youngest stakeholders among Northwestern’s leadership, his process of customizing an ERM matrix and his reaction to the recent college admissions scandal.

Risk Management Monitor: You and your department created an ERM matrix in the past year that united Northwestern’s compliance owners and that may even set a precedent in higher education. What went into its creation?

Luke Figora: We spent a lot of time defining risk appetite statements and tried to make our program a little more outcome-based and actually show how we’re moving the needle on uncertain key risks for Northwestern. And we avoided spending too much time aligning perfectly to one of the ERM frameworks like COSO or ISO. So I think if someone looked at our program from the outside, it might not check all the boxes from a typical model perspective, but it’s driving action here at Northwestern and it seems to be the right level for engagement with our stakeholders.

I think one of the biggest challenges for ERM at Northwestern—and maybe this is true across the industry—is that we don’t necessarily have one strategy right now. We have some pillars and values that Northwestern follows, but we’re ultimately a very decentralized institution that has a number of schools, and a number of units in each one of those have slightly different objectives and goals.

RMM: It seems that there is a degree of transparency, but not full transparency.

LF: Right. For example, athletics and the School of Medicine have very different risk profiles and neither one of them should know the other’s risks or operations. And it would be hard for someone in athletics to speak about the risks of animal research within the School of Medicine. I think that’s where our risk office plays a role in right-sizing the expectations and taking the feedback from all the units, but trying to do some triage through that.

RMM: Many of your colleagues are several years your senior—how has that impacted your work?

LF: I am probably the youngest person on the leadership team across the institution, but it has probably been beneficial. I have tried to bring different ideas and update the ways in which we think about risk. I’m not jaded by the insurance industry, and I think people are receptive because of that.

RMM: Since arriving at Northwestern nearly five years ago, you moved up the ranks relatively quickly, although you’ve maintained that was not your goal. How would you advise young risk professionals as they get their feet wet?  

LF: I think all of us at early stages in our careers can’t wait to be a manager and want that vertical growth and the chance to lead a team, but the bigger driving factor for me has been horizontal growth and expanding the portfolio. After that, I believe the other opportunities will come. That is a belief I try to hammer home in my work and when I make industry presentations.

RMM: The college admissions system is a hot topic due to the major scandal that broke in March. How might that have affected where the admissions process is on Northwestern’s risk register?

LF: Last year at this time, fraud in the admissions cycle wouldn’t have been one of our top 10 enterprise risks. But when things like this break, there is a tendency to go into reaction mode and examine whether we have similar issues. I always try to keep people level-headed and remind them that just because this hit doesn’t mean it moves to number one on our crisis management list for the year. It is worth doing a deep dive into the question or topic that’s in the news, but whenever scandals hit, I think we’ve tried to approach them with a rational view.

RMM: It sounds like the knee-jerk reaction is to go into crisis communication mode, even though it’s not your crisis.

LF: We know we’re going to get questions from our trustees, so there’s an initial all-hands-on-deck mentality. You have to make sure you have talking points that outline how we’ve thought about it because we know we’re going to get questions from the media. We do focus on crisis communications, but it becomes more about knowing if we have the right controls that could protect the institution from something like this happening to us.  

Figora was also the special guest on this week’s RIMScast, which you can download here.

Pregnancy-Tracking Apps Pose Challenges for Employees

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As more companies embrace health-tracking apps to encourage healthier habits and drive down healthcare costs, some employees are becoming uncomfortable with the amount and types of data the apps are sharing with their employers, insurance companies and others.

This is especially true for apps that track fertility and pregnancy. As the Washington Post recently reported, these apps collect huge amounts of personal health information, and are not always transparent about who has access to it. The digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation even published a paper in 2017 titled The Pregnancy Panopticon detailing the security and privacy issues with pregnancy-tracking apps. Employers can also pay extra for some pregnancy-tracking apps to provide them with employees’ health information directly, ostensibly to reduce health care spending and improve the company’s ability to plan for the future.

Given the documented workplace discrimination against women who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, users may worry that the information they provide the apps could impact employment options or treatment by colleagues and managers. Pregnancy-tracking apps also collect infinitely more personal data than traditional health-tracking apps and devices like step-counters or heart rate monitors. This can include everything from what medications users are taking and when they are having sex or their periods, to the color of their cervical fluid and their doctors’ names and locations.

Citing discomfort with providing this level of information, the Washington Post reported some women have even taken steps to obscure their personal details when using the apps, for fear that their employers, insurance companies, health care providers or third parties may have access to their data and could use it against them in some way. They use fake names or fake email addresses and only give the apps select details or provide inaccurate information. Fearing the invasion of their newborn children’s privacy, some have even chosen not to report their children’s births on the apps, despite this impacting their ability to track their own health and that of their newborn on the app.

Like many other apps or online platforms, it may be difficult to parse out exactly what health-tracking apps are doing with users’ information and what you are agreeing to when you sign up. When employers get involved, these issues get even more difficult. By providing incentives—either in the form of tangible rewards like cash or gift cards, or intangible benefits such as looking like a team player—companies may actually discourage their employees from looking closely at the apps’ terms of use or other key details they need to fully inform the choice to participate or not.

While getting more information about employees’ health may offer ways to improve a workforce’s health and reduce treatment costs, companies encouraging their employees to use these apps are also opening themselves up to risks. As noted above, apps are not always transparent as to what information they are storing and how. Depending on the apps’ security practices, employees’ data may be susceptible to hacking or other misuse by third-party or malicious actors. For example, in January 2018, fitness-tracking app Strava released a map of users’ activity that inadvertently exposed sensitive information about military personnel’s locations, including in war zones. Given the kinds of personal details that some apps collect, health app data could also put users at risk of identity theft or other types of fraud.

Tracking, storing, and using workers’ personal health information also exposes employers and insurance companies to a number of risks and liabilities, including third-party data storage vulnerabilities and data breaches. This is especially important in places governed by stringent online data protection regulations like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In addition to the risks of reputation damage, companies that are breached or otherwise expose employees’ personal information could face significant regulatory fines.

People using health-tracking apps, especially fertility-related apps, should weigh the costs and benefits of disclosing personal information against how apps and others are using this information. Companies who encourage their employees to use these apps and collect their personal health details should also be as transparent as possible about how they are using it, and implement measures to protect workers’ personal data to the fullest extent possible and ensure that managers are not using this data to discriminate against workers.