Interim Regional Risk Director — Recovery

Three destinations for every exposure

Every material exposure in a region ends up in one of three places. The business keeps it and manages it down, passes it to someone better placed to carry it, or walks away from the activity that creates it. The Interim Regional Risk Director, who answers to the Board of Directors, will make those calls deliberately across a region over 12 months. The exposures are the raw material; a reasoned decision on each one is the product.

Authority, kept in reserve

This is an interim seat with executive authority. The director decides how much regional risk local leaders may accept on their own, settles the evidence on which regional spending, capacity and controls are overseen, and rules on which commitments continue and which are wound down. They refuse any proposal that shifts a cost or a risk onto others unless an accountable person has accepted it, along with any investment that skips over adoption, the work it leans on or what failure would cost. They agree who leads and how issues escalate, broker disputes in which directors and operating leaders want different things, and fix how often the board sees exposures move, breach or await a decision. Sparing use matters: a risk director who intervenes everywhere soon finds nobody brings them anything early.

Why transfer is the hardest of the three

Treating an exposure is familiar work, and exiting is at least visible. Transfer is where risk quietly hides: insurance that does not respond as expected, contractual protection a counterparty cannot honour, or a shared arrangement where nobody is sure who carries the loss. A good regional risk director tests transferred exposures as rigorously as retained ones, and asks for proof that a transfer will actually respond on the day it is needed.

The register, the calls and what remains

Ninety days in, there should be a regional exposure register the board trusts, clear thresholds for who decides what, and a treat, transfer or exit call on each material exposure. Around month nine, the transfer and exit decisions should either have been carried through or brought back to the board with reasons, and treated exposures should have been tested through assurance reviews. By month 12, each residual regional exposure should have an accountable owner, sit within the agreed appetite and appear in board papers on a settled timetable.

A risk director who has inherited exposures

Your experience should reach across six countries or more, in businesses of $835 million in revenue and 4,300 people or larger, and you can tell which local deviations a market truly requires and which survive only because nobody challenged them. We will examine succession, professionalisation and buy-side M&A; acquisitions matter because exposures inherited in a deal are often the least understood. We will also test risk judgement at level 4, with regulatory engagement, risk appetite and assurance testing at level 3. You protect controls that work, put a price on every exception and leave a stronger bench behind you.

Who decides, and in what order

The opening conversation is private, by video, with the Board of Directors in the first week. Week three belongs to the Board Chair, who works through with you how exposures, and the decisions on them, should reach the board. Week five brings a panel of executives, met in person, from each function, and the directors as a whole see you in the seventh week. Our response comes in writing, within two working days of each meeting.