Risk Consulting

Risk Consulting, previously known as Risk and Compliance, is still a relatively young business and is expanding fast. Last year our net sales grew by 16%, overall, with Financial Risk Management work growing by a significant 42% across KPMG Europe LLP, and IT Advisory growing by 24%. The UK performed particularly strongly and there was excellent growth too in the Netherlands, Spain and the CIS. We saw good segmental contribution growth across Risk Consulting in all ELLP firms of 5% in 2011, with the Netherlands advancing particularly strongly with a 27% increase

Businesses face a growing range of risks — financial, operational, fraud, IT and strategic — and increasingly we are working with executive teams to take preventative measures or, when situations occur, to take robust remedial action.

We help boards — which have ultimate responsibility for managing risk — to see risk as one compelling story requiring robust mitigation strategies, by guiding them on likely future trends, and making sure we are developing the right capabilities.

Regulatory risk was a major preoccupation for our FS clients last year and our practice is a driving force behind our Financial Regulation Centre of Excellence, based in London. We have a strong presence in this field in Europe’s major financial centres but also a growing presence in Russia and Spain, where there’s growing demand from companies operating in Latin America.

We assisted a major UK bank to restructure its group-wide anti-money laudering programme. We developed a Target Operating Model that reflected industry best practice and assisted the bank to implement it in a controlled sequence of transition states to ensure that each division progressed at a consistent rate.

Regulation is a big concern in other sectors too, including Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Communications & Media, and ENR.

We continue to recruit a wide number of experienced hires, many at a senior level, attracting people from diverse backgrounds and with a rich variety of skills. Through heavy investment in training and development we are also changing the mindset of people already in ELLP firms, from junior positions right up to experienced partners, so that we are better able to target the C-level leaders at our current and prospective clients.

Our Risk Consulting Summer School, at Reading University, brought 1,400 of our people together from across ELLP firms and has created a real buzz about the potential we can achieve, working together as one integrated organisation.

Our young talent expects us to deliver a rich, rewarding and highly mobile work environment and we launched our Move50 programme to boost overseas assignments and secondments. This also helps us spread skills and services to new locations. To further increase our focus on diversity issues, we have appointed two partners, Yvonne Vlasman and Kathryn Britten, to our leadership team with a remit to focus on diversity issues.