Your ethical profile will feature a number of ethical risks and after the priority ones have been identified, they need to incorporated into your company’s corporate governance arrangements. This ensures that the Board is kept informed about the key ethical risks and about the internal controls being used to manage them.
It’s important that this doesn’t turn into a paper exercise detached from the realities of what is happening in the company. The risks need to be accurately represented and the internal controls clearly specified, to ensure that the right questions get asked, either by the Board or through internal audit. Having both set up internal controls frameworks from scratch and revitalised existing ones, I have the practical management experience to ensure that your Board is kept informed about the ethical issues that matter.
Here are a couple of yardsticks to place against the corporate governance arrangements of any insurance or financial planning business. If, over the last three years, there’s hasn’t been an ethical risk featured in your internal control schedule, or in that same period, internal audit hasn’t conducted a review of how a particular ethical risk is being managed, then the chances are that the links to your corporate governance are in need of review. Get in touch and we can look at how best to strenghten them.
Duncan is an independent adviser on business ethics, with a particular focus on the insurance and financial planning sectors. He worked in insurance for 18 years and has been an ethics adviser for 11 years. He's a Chartered Insurance Practitioner.