We play a vital role in maintaining strong, stable financial markets – and our employees are creatively embedding risk management into our culture.
As a global financial services company, we play a vital role in maintaining strong, stable financial markets and promoting economic growth. We help deliver on these responsibilities through our effective risk management and high ethical standards. And we are always engaging our employees with risk culture content and training to further develop their important role as risk managers. In 2018, our Risk Champions around the company piloted regional initiatives to further embed strong risk management in our culture.
Our Brazil region created a Risk Champions League where employee teams learned about risk while competing for points through quizzes, scavenger hunts, workshops and a gameshow-style finale. Of the BNY Mellon Brazil employees who participated, 90 percent said the quiz content was useful and broadened their risk management knowledge.
Winning team captain Márcia Figueiras, head of Brazil Custody in Asset Servicing, said, “The championship reinforced risk management in a fun way and allowed employees to suggest clarifying points in our risk policies and procedures. It was a very rewarding experience!”
Risk Champions in our Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region developed a comprehensive Risk Champions program, led by Manchester Site Executive Ferghal O’Hanlon, Global Head of Operations Embedded Control. The program included Senior Leader Culture Breakfast sessions and Risk Ownership workshops promoting our Three Lines of Defense risk management model. In addition, 65 Ethical Dilemma Workshops were held throughout EMEA and India, engaging more than 1,200 employees with a range of ethical dilemma scenarios that could arise in their roles. In one example, an employee emails a report to herself from a co-worker’s computer and discovers the co-worker bought stock in a BNY Mellon client company using insider knowledge of a merger not yet public. The employee knows she should report the insider trading, but is torn because using her colleague’s computer violated company policy. Participants discussed these difficult situations and how they would respond, and reviewed BNY Mellon resources available to employees for support.
Based on enthusiastically positive feedback, the Global Risk Culture Strategy Team plans to scale workshops such as these through online simulations available to all employees to continue promoting our strong risk culture.
