Wonford is a specialist consultancy focusing on risk management and capital adequacy for financial services firms.
Risk management frameworks are a growing area of interest for regulators globally, and the learning curve for compliance officers can seem daunting. Just what is expected for your level of firm? Where do you start?
We take a no-nonsense approach.
Our aim is to provide a bridge between compliance and risk management.
We advocate transparency, aiming to demystify what can seem an opaque area of regularity compliance.
Providing a proportionate service, we will supply a firm with advice and solutions, ranging from straightforward template provision, through bespoke documentation, to help on specialist systems and tools. From the smallest IFA to full-scope brokerages we have the answers.
Please contact us at enquiries@wonford.co.uk to discuss your requirements.
RISK MANAGEMENT
Fundamental to running any business, let alone one under regulation, is an appreciation of risks that business faces and an adequate provision of controls and mitigants to protect it.
Formalised under a risk management framework, this approach provides an anchoring point for a firm’s policies and procedures, its training requirements, IT protections, compliance monitoring and its capital and liquidity planning.
Regulatory emphasis on risk management has has recently been reinforced by the FCA with the publication of FG 20/1 Our framework: assessing adequate financial resources in June.
CAPITAL ADEQUACY & ICARA
The occurrence of a risk event will usually hit the bottom line directly or indirectly. Maintaining adequate capital to absorb these events is vital to a business’s ability to survive adverse conditions.
Under a regulatory regime, there will be mandatory minimum capital requirements, and these will differ widely dependent on the type of firm.
Whether a firm is required to provide the regulator a formal documentation of its capital adequacy planning in the form of an ICARA document, it is still a prerequisite of operating in a regulatory environment that capital adequacy should be maintained at all times.
Capital adequacy is often regarded as adherence to various published formulas and requirements, but in truth, it needs to be supplemented by risk planning.
Under ICARA, there is a wider requirement to manage risk within a formalised framework as a threshold condition which applies to all firms under FCA regulation
SYSTEMS
With backgrounds in both compliance consulting and software development, we have a history of both development of, and content provision for, compliance and risk systems.
Understanding the necessary workflows and being able to call on experience of the FCA’s views on proportionality, we have been able to provide firms with systems that fit their needs and avoid over-engineered solutions.