From the Chair.

The evolving role of the CRO - Leadership, Strategy and Emerging Challenges. Our CEO, Jon Macdonald, was invited to be a panellist at the Society of Actuaries of Ireland’s 2025 conference, where he joined industry leaders to explore the many emerging challenges facing the insurance and reinsurance sectors in an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving world. The discussion focused on how shifting risk landscapes, driven by factors such as geopolitical uncertainty, climate ch

The businesses that get Risk Governance right don't just avoid bad outcomes. They grow faster, attract better capital, access opportunities their competitors can't, and spend their leadership bandwidth on building rather than firefighting. Risk Governance, done well, is not a constraint on growth. It is one of its most powerful enablers.

There is a version of Risk Governance that kills start-ups slowly. Not through bad luck or market timing, but through the well-intentioned application of the wrong framework at the wrong moment. I've seen it more than once. A founder hires a Chief Risk Officer - often because the regulator expects one, sometimes because an investor insists. The CRO arrives with five days a week to fill and a career's worth of frameworks to deploy

Most CEOs I have worked with have a complicated relationship with their Risk function. They know they need one, but they're not always sure what it's for. And they've usually had at least one experience that made them quietly wonder whether it was doing more harm than good.

The most destructive assumption a regulated business can make is that the regulator is the enemy. It is surprisingly common. I have sat in boardrooms where senior executives described their regulator as ill-informed, commercially naive, poorly educated and actively damaging to the business. The language ranged from frustrated to contemptuous. The regulatory relationship was adversarial. And in every one of those cases, the business was spending a disproportionate amount of i