Video transcript: Build resilience and navigate disruption

Transcript

Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles: A crisis can mean different things at different organisations, but ultimately it's at a point when an organisation needs to respond at pace to protect its reputation, its bottom line, and its trust with its stakeholders.

Isabelle Gross: Approaching any crisis situation, empathy and understanding are really critical but also defending that business.

Kris McConkey: Understanding how to bring the business back up and show that there's light at the end of the tunnel is a hugely important part of what we do.

Bobbie: Organisations are facing a huge amount of complexity right now. They're facing geopolitical risks, cyber risk, climate risk, financial risk.

Isabelle: Insolvencies are increasing and therefore the stakeholders around the company are having more financial difficulties, which can have an impact even on a really good company.

Kris: The types of crises that we help clients respond to are hugely varied. It might be a government department that has found an espionage intrusion in their network.

We also see a huge amount of fraud and cybercrime, but more often than not, we're still dealing with a lot of ransomware intrusions where an organisation genuinely is on their knees.

Bobbie: Cyber risk and financial risk are clearly related, because a cyber-attack can directly have significant financial impact and cause financial distress.

Isabelle: The kind of crisis that would see me coming into a situation is generally where it's caused financial distress within the company, so it could be trading performance has just not been on track. And it could be that a customer’s gone into an insolvency process and therefore are not paying their bills. It could be a cyber attack.

Bobbie: One of the most important things our clients can do is actually get in touch with us as soon as a crisis happens, or even indeed when a slow burn issue starts to look like it's emerging.

Kris: Clients are getting good at detecting early, and so we're actually getting brought into incidents where it's possible to still mitigate a lot of the long tail of the damage.

Bobbie: When we're in a crisis with a client, that first phase is all about helping them establish structure, understand what their strategic objectives are. That quickly then turns into how do we stabilise the business.

Isabelle: We will bring whatever it is that is required for the company to get it back on its feet and continue into the future.

Kris: We're one of the very few that has the ability to not just deal with the technical stuff, but actually helping organisations with the recovery afterwards.

Isabelle: Something that I'm doing a lot more of at the moment is ensuring that companies are financially resilient by stressing different areas of their forecasts, different areas of their business. And understanding those impacts means that they can plan much better.

Bobbie: Many of the big global banks we've been working with to really help ensure that they have the right resilience measures in place, but we've also now been taking a lot of the practice that we've learned in financial services and taking that to other sectors, for example, within the energy sector, but also consumer and retail, who have been impacted by various crisis scenarios.

I feel really passionate about working with our clients to make sure they are as ready as possible for whatever disruption might come, but also that they can continue to grow.