Interim Regional Risk Director — Independent Challenge

Challenge that changes a decision

Independent risk challenge is easy to describe and hard to evidence. A second line can attend every underwriting committee, comment on every capital paper and still change nothing. The test this interim director will be held to is narrower and more useful: can the board point to capital and capacity decisions that came out differently because risk challenged them, and can it see that the challenge arrived before the decision rather than in a post-mortem?

Reporting to the Board of Directors, the director holds executive authority, and its scope is broad. You will establish how risk decisions across the region are taken, including the limits within which country risk heads may act without referring upward. You will select the evidence on which decisions about capital, underwriting capacity and controls are governed. Inherited commitments continue or end on your ruling. You will refuse proposals that shift exposure onto a business line that never agreed to hold it, along with investment cases that give no account of take-up, of what else they lean on, or of failure. You will approve the leadership line-up and the route unresolved issues follow, broker settlements when directors and underwriting or claims heads disagree, and decide how often the board hears about progress, breaches and choices still pending.

The finest judgement lies at the boundary with the first line. Underwriting, claims and pricing leaders own their risks; the second line's job is to test them, not to take them over. A director who drifts into running the business loses the independence that made the challenge worth having, and one who stays too far back produces opinions nobody needs to answer.

Twelve months a board can check for itself

Within ninety days, the regional thresholds for challenge should be settled, and each open risk exception should have a first-line owner who knows it is theirs. By about month nine, challenge should be visible in the record: capital and capacity decisions where the second line's view was heard and altered the result, and inherited commitments without support that have been stopped. By month 12, second-line challenge should run to a settled board rhythm, with a successor in place who can sustain it once the interim term ends.

A record of evidence moving people and capital

You have made risk and compliance decisions in insurance or reinsurance where delay had a measurable cost, inside organisations taking in $630 million or more, employing 1,000 people or more and operating in seven countries or more. Your record should include decisions where new evidence moved people, money or leadership time from one priority to another. Your cost transformation, succession and professionalisation work will be examined. It expects risk judgement at level 4 and level 3 in assurance testing, in regulatory engagement and in setting risk appetite. Be ready for one question in particular: which popular commitment did you end, what evidence led you there, and what did ending it free up?

The board first, and the board last

Proceedings open in week one with the Board of Directors, on a closed video call. Two weeks on, in week three, you work through a practical exercise on challenge with the Risk Committee Chair. In week five, executives who each head a different function meet you in person, a useful test of how your challenge lands with the people who run the business. The process ends where it began, with all the directors together, in week seven. After each stage, expect our view in writing inside four working days.