Template:Opco scene setter
It isn’t hard to imagine the scene: a monthly risk operating committee meeting with a standing agenda designed systemically and mechanically to identify minimise and manage risks to the business. Some COO functionary will spend a fortnight leading up to the meeting issuing progressively warnings badgering “stakeholders” providing their bit of the 300-page deck that will serve as materials for the meeting, to be circulated 48 hours in advance.
Not a soul will have read these materials before the meeting — it wouldn’t be physically possible at the average adult reading speed — and nor would one be any wiser if she had: these barely-concealed threats are just the weft and warp of the financial services dominance display. It is all very performative. As, indeed, is the deck.
Each risk function will dispatch mid-ranking delegates to the meeting. These are essentially votive lambs, offered up to take a beating, if needed, without making things worse for those who sent them. The delegate must “talk to her slides”, about which she will in practice understand very little, sounding informed enough to pass without remark, but not so informed to prompt any questions. If the Opco chair got out of the wrong side of bed, or should your attestation be a bit anaemic, she may snap, and launch into a five-minute long personal shellacking, in front of the assembled. This is the modern-day equivalent of a public stoning. But not to the death: there are three hundred pages to get though, and eighteen risk groups presenting, so for most delegates, attendance is a 2-hour-long game of Russian Roulette where there are only a handful of bullets in what is quite a large chamber.
In any case, should the opco chair come for you, her question will not be, “where is your risk”, but the far stupider one “why are you displaying a risk”, as if “risk” is not an immutable function of commercial life. Such grumpiness is outdated in our compulsively empathetic times, and may soon pass into history the same way bear-baiting, throwing Christians to lions and rucking with your studs all have. We think this is a pity: financial services ought to be a blood-sport: there should be some sense of jeopardy. Instead everyone will be kind, respectful of standpoints and lived experiences and so will passive-aggressively knife people privately instead.
In any case the Opco will methodically plough through each risk function’s slides, which will tell the same story: inevitable, manageable procedural glitches of life in a complicated modern financial services business. All kinds of metrics will be presented, analysed, and set out in impressively voluminous graphs, charts and data tables. A dashboard of “high risk” clients, derived from these operational metrics, may be presented, but the RAG array will read uniform green — perhaps studded with the odd amber, for the sake of plausibility — but these hazards will be easily-addressed talking points included “for good order” but accompanied with firm assurances of no materially elevated risk of loss.