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Merlance is a board advisory and risk management consultancy
The core of Merlance’s approach is to provide risk management advice that is useful in the strategic management of a business.
Merlance concentrates on those elements of risk management that are most relevant to senior decision makers.
How can we know that we are looking at the right risks?
How can we make sure that we are using the full range of options in managing those risks?
How can we make sure that the risk work we do forms a useful part of our planning and management?
How can we evaluate the risk information we are receiving?
How credible is the quantification of the risks?
Is the evaluation of risks we are being shown keeping up with changes in our strategy and the wider world?
Merlance’s advisory practice focuses on supporting senior management in getting the best value from risk management.
For businesses that want to upgrade their risk function without additional full time headcount, Merlance can provide the full services of a risk department in outsourced form.
This can include:
Risk process planning
Risk reporting and analysis
Report and dashboard design
Board and management meeting support
Attendance at internal or external meetings as 'virtual CRO'
Regulatory compliance support
The service is modular and can be tailored to the needs of your business, whether this requires support from a distance or regular onsite presence.
Merlance can help you identify and understand your principal risks, not just for reporting, but to assist in the effective management of your business.
Are the risks we have documented really the ones that could most harm our business or stop us achieving our strategic objectives?
Do the risks we have documented connect with our strategic planning?
Are there major risks that never seem to get discussed?
Merlance can:
- provide a structure
- support workshops for the identification of risks
- assist meaningful quantification
- identify risk management strategies
- create a risk package for inclusion in your annual report.
Merlance can help you answer some fundamental questions about your risk and governance framework:
Does our risk management and governance framework provide us with an effective structure for the management of risk at appropriate levels within our organisation?
How does our risk management and governance structure match up to regulatory good practice expectations?
How good is our risk management and governance structure in terms of stakeholder expectations (investors, non-executive directors etc.)?
Does our risk and governance framework make effective use of the existing management framework and activities?
Merlance can provide both an analysis of current structures and proposals and designs for improvement, with an emphasis on building structures that are practical and appropriate.
We believe that it is difficult to manage risk unless you know how much risk you are willing to take.
What risks are absolutely intolerable?
What are the necessary risks for execution of our strategy? Are there risks we want to take more of?
What is our appetite around relevant non-financial risks?
o Reputation risk
o Regulatory risk
o Risk of negative environmental impact
o Health and safety risks
We can provide approaches and mechanisms for determining, understanding and keeping fresh an understanding of your firm’s appetite and tolerance across the spectrum of risks you face, and for mapping these to useable a useable monitoring process
We believe that detached, abstract risk management is a waste of time and money.
To be useful, risk management needs to be integrated into the activities of a firm in a way that is practical and acknowledged to be of value.
We believe that the goal of good risk management is good management.
It is very, very rare for good risk management just to 'happen' and risk management that is imposed without building understanding is doomed to be regarded as an unnecessary burden and may be bypassed in the pursuit of better understood objectives.
Embedding useful risk management is the result of conscious activity that cuts across many different disciplines, levels and areas of an organisation.
Merlance provides structures and approaches to embed risk management into your organisation in ways that integrate to your existing business activities and enrich them.
Discussions of corporate ‘culture’ have become a greater part of how regulators view companies and corporate culture forms a central element of the Financial Reporting Council’s recent update of the UK Corporate Governance Code.
It is obvious that the culture and values of an organisation are significant drivers of its performance, but understanding and modifying culture can seem like an impossibly vast and abstract exercise. It can be hard to pin down, uncomfortable for management and difficult to demonstrate tangible results to stakeholders.
Cultural change does not occur without effort, understanding and a clear approach to cascade the values expressed by the Board through the organisation. Merlance provides an approach to cultural evaluation and a structure for using this to build and improve a firm’s culture in a way that is tangible and explicable to interested parties.
There is no lack of information about Brexit. The problem for businesses is that most of this information consists of discussions of the politics and speculation about the macro implications of the possible outcomes.
Merlance cuts through this with a methodology that systematically reviews a business and identifies those changes that are likely to affect how it operates.
The goal of our process is not to help you understand the broader context or the full spectrum of possible permutations of negotiation outcomes.
The goal of our process is to provide you with actionable intelligence to make your business resilient in the face of Brexit driven change.
Risk reporting should be concise, relevant and actionable.
We have considerable experience of designing appropriate risk reporting for different types of organisation and for the demands and preferences of individual managers and Boards.
We understand the difficulties of keeping risk information fresh and the reporting relevant to the audience.
Our experience as the recipients of risk reports gives us the perspective from the other side of the desk and ensures that our approach is grounded in practicality and usability.
Our risk reporting approach is tailored for each organisation based on management need and data quality, and our approach includes methods for improving existing data as well as generating new risk information.
One of the most common problems with non-financial risks is the lack of quality data to support the kinds of rigorous analysis which is possible with market or credit risks, for which there are often significant quantities of ‘hard’ risk data.
This lack of data means that, unless this gap is understood and acknowledged, the output of much risk analysis can have very shaky foundations.
This can become a block to useful action unless strategies are devised to understand the nature and levels of the uncertainties to which an organisation is exposed.
We provide approaches to uncertainty that ensure that these deficits are recognised and strategies created to allow meaningful responses to a firm’s risks, even when these are hard to quantify.
We help businesses to perform better by understanding how risks affect business outcomes and by implementing changes to improve those outcomes.
We provide services that are based on having a clear understanding specific individual needs and by applying relevant knowledge and experience. We do not believe that there is a set of generic slide packs that can be rolled out for every circumstance.
Our experience cuts across a wide range of businesses and fields of expertise. The list above represents a cross-section of our competencies.
Merlance makes risk management USEFUL and creates risk management structures and approaches that are USED.
USEFUL – Credible, practical and relevant. USED – Trusted to help make better decisions.
Patrick Healy is Merlance’s Principal.