RGS Business Advisors
Integrating ERM Ecosystems within Enterprises

Like all credit unions, pursuing and managing risk is an important undertaking for Kern Schools Federal Credit Union (KSFCU.) But when they recognized that the complexity and magnitude of risk had grown materially, they chose to respond. Implementing Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) was the solution, and RGS Business Advisors was the firm that helped them obtain that goal. By adopting their year-one ERM program, KSFCU was able to establish risk appetite, generate a risk profile, report that information to the board, and improve strategic decision making.

Many such successful instances reflect RGS Business Advisors’ core competency, which is ERM that is integrated with board governance and strategy management. As the initials of its name suggest, Risk, Governance, and Strategy is the fundamental agenda upon which RGS Business Advisors operates. “We provide trusted advice along with tools and techniques, to implement or improve ERM programs and achieve strategies,” states David Seibert, President of RGS Business Advisors.

As an industry veteran and with longstanding corporate experience, Seibert draws from world-class risk management and strategy execution processes from superb organizations. “I studied the risk management capabilities and activities of the current day and formulated a way to integrate that with corporate strategy and board governance to implement more successful, more relevant enterprise risk management programs,” he adds. RGS Business Advisors will often begin an engagement by building the ERM foundation, which includes the building blocks of governance, policies, roles, and responsibilities, and risk categories, to name a few.

This is followed by “ERM in action” such as an enterprise risk assessment or a key risk indicator (KRI) program, both of which are anchored to corporate strategy. The KRIs are developed in three distinct levels, with the highest levels being easily digested by the board of directors. In a nutshell, the KRIs provide continuous monitoring of key risk drivers while the periodic reporting to the board offers them with the information they need to fulfill their risk oversight duties.

Additionally, Seibert mentions, “ERM’s purpose and value is typically under-communicated to the organization by a factor of ten, and this simple fact can be the demise of an ERM program.” With this in mind, RGS Business Advisors acts as a reliable partner to help clients in their ERM journey, including topics like awareness and communication.

Addressing strategy in the Risk, Governance, and Strategy ecosystem, RGS Business Advisors, plays a vital role in clients’ strategic planning cycle. This goes beyond risk appetite and may include decision-support techniques and Monte Carlo simulations to forecast strategic outcomes. What makes RGS Business Advisors unique is their explicit discussions on the limitations of risk matrices, including when they should and should not be used. Further addressing strategy, RGS Business Advisors always assesses the risk of the strategy and the risk to the strategy.

The company supports all industries and more recently has been working with large credit unions. Their services are typically a fixed fee/fixed scope arrangement with success criteria, so clients know the value they will receive. Alongside this, they also focus on the essential elements of ERM. The company learns from each of its partnerships and engagements and thus has an exceptional vantage point of what elements of ERM are of high value and which are not. Seibert concluded with “our clients expect the highest value and no wasted efforts, so we focus on the essential.”