Our Practice

For an entire career in Royal Bank of Canada, Ram Angod managed bank branches, account-managed personal, commercial and corporate (real estate) borrowers, market-managed a commercial division at field level, led a Canada-wide commercial strategic planning unit, managed introduction of risk-based internal auditing at Group level, and led business risk management in an operating division.

His decision-making responsibilities, bottom-line focus, business management maturity and experience set Ram Angod apart from other front-line risk management consultants.

We have been providing risk consulting for business management, internal auditing and governance since 2000. Our clients have been mid-size and smaller companies, both publicly owned and privately held entities in the financial and manufacturing sectors. We have risk-assessed and provided guidance for over 60 risk situations, including groups of companies, subsidiaries, divisions, businesses, functions, and processes.
Our business management guidance is diverse and is aimed to reduce the risk of:

• Business failure due to strategy misalignment with market or resource realities;
• Fines, penalties, sanctions, and reputation damage arising from non-compliance with regulations, statutes, laws or conventions;
• Investor wrath from financial reporting non-disclosure and inaccuracy;
• Financial losses relating to credit, market, liquidity and foreign exchange risks;
• Fraud/wrongdoing in “opportunity” activities, e.g. cash, purchasing, receivables, property, and inventory management;
• Property destruction/business discontinuity due to disastrous events;
• Reputational damage due to the inappropriate actions of employees/directors;
• Etc.

We distinguish our consulting depth from our competition in a number of ways:

• We understand how organizations work as socio-economic institutions and the effects which culture, power, authority, and social aggregation can have on group and individual behaviour and performance.
• We are inherently holistic in our outlook, i.e. we view risk and events in terms of their causative origins and examine consequences both for cause and effect within systems. Our approach helps us to understand business behaviour vertically, horizontally and diagonally across the enterprise.
• We are capable of both seeing strategically and acting operationally. This competence has been useful for assisting clients with practical guidance for implementing our recommendations.
• Our style is to engage clients in dynamic resolution of their risk and control issues. This has been a critical factor for achieving consensus, embedding knowledge about risk and its management, strengthening ownership, and building sustainable self-reliance.

Our competence is the product of intuition, experience and knowledge.

As a rule, RiskVeda doesn’t enter into a work assignment, or conduct risk and control assessments unprepared. Several times we were asked to extend our risk management expertise to activities in which we had only a bank lender’s knowledge but no direct experience, e.g. manufacturing, retailing.

We routinely conduct research on the client’s industry and regulatory environment to identify and apply, as applicable, emerging best practices and guidelines relating to the client’s business.

In our pre-work analysis and diagnosis, we study the client’s strategic plan, business plans, financial statements, regulatory reports, org charts, client and employee surveys, and other structural data. This is backed up by individual interviews with key players, including board members, as required.

In terms of professional discipline, we actively keep abreast with current literature and trends in risk management, internal auditing and governance. We have access to professional guidance and practices in these respects. Theoretical and methodological constructs we apply in our practice however, are often proprietary versus formulaic and clichéd.