Three key areas to improve your RCSAs

Report - December 2023

The RCSA process continues to be an important activity for banks and insurers, enabling them to identify, assess and mitigate their material operational and non-financial risks (ONFR) risks

While many of our members have previously conducted various initiatives to optimise and upgrade their RCSA activities, there is still a wide range of practices and maturity. Firms also continue to address common challenges, such as how to align the RCSA exercise with business strategy and how to assess risk along an end-to-end process view.

Consequently, the ORX Risk Management Working Group (RMWG) selected RCSAs for further discussion at roundtables during October and November, looking at current and emerging practices. As part of these sessions, ORX facilitated the sharing of challenges and experiences between our members, interactive polls and discussions. The discussions allowed attendees to benchmark their RCSA activities and share best practices.

From these sessions, we've summarised three key ways in which firms can optimise and extract greater value from the RCSA process:

1. The first line of defence
2. Moving to a process view of RCSAs
3. Aligning to business strategy