FERMA president outlines a new mandate for risk managers

FERMA president Philippe Cotelle is calling on risk managers to move beyond identifying threats and become strategic advisers, helping organisations grapple with an increasingly volatile and uncertain world.

Key points:
Risk managers must evolve
Insight drives influence
Resilience over prediction

Speaking to AIRMIC Today, Cotelle argued that the profession’s future lies not in reporting risks but in helping leadership teams make better decisions. As geopolitical tensions, technological disruption, climate-related events and economic uncertainty increasingly overlap, he believes risk managers have an opportunity to become one of the most important sources of strategic insight within an organisation.

“The risk landscape is becoming more volatile, interconnected and non-linear,” he told AIRMIC Today. “As a result, risk management must evolve from a reactive reporting function into a strategic capability.”

For many years, risk management has been associated with identifying threats, maintaining risk registers and communicating exposures to senior leadership. Those responsibilities remain important. What is changing, Cotelle argues, is the environment in which organisations now operate.

Risks no longer emerge in neat, isolated categories. A geopolitical event can disrupt supply chains, trigger economic consequences and create regulatory challenges. Extreme weather can affect operations, infrastructure and energy security. Technological innovation can simultaneously create opportunities and introduce new vulnerabilities.

Increasingly, organisations are dealing with several crises at once.

“There is no doubt that organisations are experiencing a shift from a relatively predictable and linear environment into one characterised by overlapping crises, rapid change and heightened uncertainty,” Cotelle said.

Focus on resilience

The challenge for risk managers is that traditional approaches are becoming less effective in this environment.

For decades, organisations have relied heavily on forecasting future outcomes based on historical trends and known risk patterns. Yet in a world where risks interact and evolve in unexpected ways, the ability to predict specific outcomes is becoming less valuable than the ability to adapt.

That is why Cotelle believes the profession must focus less on trying to forecast every possible event and more on helping organisations understand uncertainty.

“Organisations must instead focus on resilience, adaptability and preparedness,” he said. “They must balance immediate business priorities with a longer-term understanding of resilience and sustainability.”

“This creates an important role for risk managers in stimulating that longer-term thinking within the organisation,” he stressed.

Insight, not information

“To strengthen credibility and influence, risk managers need to bring new perspectives to decision-makers.”

In practical terms, that means shifting the conversation from what might happen to what it could mean for the business. It also requires risk managers to rethink the value they bring to leadership teams.

“We have to acknowledge that senior leaders have access to the same news, reports and information as everyone else,” he pointed out. 

“The value of risk management increasingly lies in its ability to provide objective analysis, unique insights and a clearer understanding of what emerging developments mean for the business.”

According to Cotelle, this creates “an opportunity” for risk managers to strengthen both their credibility and their influence.

“To strengthen credibility and influence, risk managers need to bring new perspectives to decision-makers, supported by data, evidence and measurable indicators rather than relying solely on observations of external events,” he said.

Developing that capability will require better intelligence and more sophisticated tools.

“Given how the risk environment is evolving, a purely short-term focus is becoming increasingly dangerous.”

Cotelle believes the profession should focus on building objective indicators that help organisations track how risks are evolving over time. These indicators could cover areas such as geopolitical instability, climate risk, supply chain disruption and emerging technology exposures.

“There is a growing need for objective measures that track changes,” he said.

Importantly, Cotelle is not arguing for more data, rather for better intelligence.

The goal is to provide insights that go beyond publicly available information and help decision-makers understand the potential business implications of emerging trends.

By doing so, risk management can help organisations move away from “reactive decision-making” and towards more resilient strategies. That longer-term thinking is becoming increasingly important.

Cotelle acknowledges that organisations operate under intense short-term pressures. Quarterly reporting cycles, annual targets, shareholder expectations and market scrutiny all encourage a focus on immediate results.

Yet he warns that given how the risk environment is evolving “a purely short-term focus is becoming increasingly dangerous.”

“We have to accept that organisations operate under significant short-term performance pressures, but equally the nature of risk is increasingly demanding a longer-term perspective,” he said.

Organisations are no longer facing isolated events that emerge, peak and disappear. Instead, the consequences of one crisis often continue while new challenges emerge, creating compounding effects over extended periods.

As a result, risk managers have an important role to play. “Risk professionals can help leadership teams look beyond immediate reporting cycles and understand how today’s decisions may affect future resilience,” Cotelle said.

“It is about considering the second and third-tier consequences of strategic choices and finding ways to balance those short-term performance objectives with long-term sustainability,” he noted.

FERMA-Airmic collaboration is critical

No organisation, however, can navigate this environment alone. Cotelle believes collaboration will become increasingly important as risks grow more interconnected and complex.

“No single organisation, insurer or market participant has a complete view of emerging risks,” he said.

Improving information-sharing and developing trusted sources of intelligence will require closer cooperation between risk managers, insurers and other stakeholders. 

“Risk associations such as FERMA and Airmic are uniquely positioned to provide this,” he said. “Unlike individual companies they can bring together perspectives from across the market to create a broader and more representative view of emerging risks and trends.”

Ultimately, Cotelle sees the profession at an important moment in its evolution.

The future risk manager will not be defined by their ability to catalogue threats or maintain risk registers. Those capabilities are increasingly expected.

What will distinguish the profession is its ability to help organisations make sense of uncertainty, understand the implications of change and make better decisions.

In a world where information is everywhere, insight might become the most valuable risk management tool of all.

For more news from AIRMIC Today, click here.

Did you get value from this story? Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox.