Stuart Mills

At Westpac Group, the Group Operational Risk team are currently undertaking a simplification and enhancement program across the entire Operational Risk Framework. This includes simplifying the structure and language of the policy framework along with enhancing the supporting guidance and training materials and upgrading Group’s Operational system. A key component of the program is the development and implementation of the Group’s approach to operational resilience. The goal? Ensuring the Group is able to respond effectively respond to an incident or outage and minimise the impact of the customer. What does that mean? When operating in a cyber landscape, you can no longer simply think you’ll not have an incident to respond to – the question is more so around how your organization’s culture and resources are geared to effectively minimizing and responding to such inevitable incidents.

Your risk management program is only as effective as the line of communication and clarity of processes and responsibilities across the 3 lines of defence. It’s common knowledge that being effective at this is a challenge most large financial institutions face and this panel will see risk leaders from each of the lines offering perspectives around how to improve on this aspect.