AMP improves risk management and governance with new hire

Wealth giant AMP has continued to improve risk management and governance across the company with a new hire.

Anne-Marie Paterson, senior legal practitioner and former executive manager and whistleblower investigation officer at CBA, has been appointed group whistleblowing officer. This hire will compliment AMP’s extra investment of $100 million (pre-tax) over two years to further strengthen its risk, governance, and controls.

In her new role, Paterson will be responsible for leading whistleblower awareness, training, and investigations across the business.

“Risk has been placed at the core of AMP’s culture and further enhancing risk management, governance, and compliance continues to be a key initiative under AMP’s new strategy,” said Henny Fagg, AMP chief risk officer. “We have appointed Anne-Marie Paterson as our Group Whistleblowing Officer in recognition of how seriously we take whistleblowing and to help people feel comfortable speaking up. We have also made significant progress to overhaul our governance and organisational structures to create better independence and oversight of issues. Our activity has focused on improving policies, processes and systems and increasing the use of technology to create efficiencies.”

AMP said its other risk-management initiatives include:

• a new risk system that captures incident, issue, and breach information more effectively, efficiently, and consistently;
• new risk processes to manage interactions with regulators and provide more comprehensive regulatory reporting to management and the board;
• upgrading processes and technologies to improve its ability to identify and prevent financial crime;
• increasing capacity and the visibility of risk in all roles across AMP to effect cultural change; and
• stronger board governance including common membership between the AMP and AMP Bank boards and now both the remuneration and risk committees consist of all non-executive directors. The audit committee is also now comprised of all non-executive directors other than AMP Chairman David Murray.

“We are delivering on our mandate to improve the way we manage risk across AMP,” Fagg said. “Our stakeholders, including our customers, expect us to manage our risk effectively and the commercial return on doing so is profound.”