A single risk lens across complex markets

Brief

A capital markets group wanted to enhance its global Business-Wide Risk Assessment (BWRA) across multiple specialised businesses. The challenge was not only scale, but complexity. Different products, execution models, customer chains and potential sanctions exposure required a more sophisticated approach that combined a quantitative and qualitative lens.

The client team also wanted a more structured way to understand its own financial crime risks, across money laundering (ML), terrorist financing (TF), sanctions, and proliferation financing (PF) exposure, as well as a stronger internal foundation for managing these risks.

Existing risk assessments were fragmented, overly reliant on population-based logic, and insufficiently aligned to FCA expectations on market-based money laundering, sanctions exposure and risk narrative quality.

What we did

HKA worked with the client to design a more robust, simpler and easier-to-maintain BWRA framework. Rather than producing a static assessment, we supported the client in reshaping how risk was understood and articulated across the business. This included focusing on how exposure arises through customers, jurisdictions, products, transactions, and channels, and where ML, TF, sanctions, and PF risks can crystallise.

This approach enabled the client to move from generic assessments to a sharper, evidence-based view of risk. We supplemented the redesigned methodology with strengthened controls narratives, management information, second-line testing priorities and board-ready reporting.

Outcomes

The client now has a more coherent, credible and supervisory-ready articulation of financial crime risk across its core businesses. The redesigned framework provides multiple levels of granularity, enabling both an enterprise-wide view of exposure and a clearer understanding of specific risk hotspots across the global organisation. It has also strengthened internal knowledge, giving the team greater confidence and capability to maintain and evolve the risk assessment going forward.

• Multiple business lines aligned under a single coherent and simplified financial crime risk assessment
• 100% refresh of inherent risk and control narratives across complex trading and market-facing activities
• Regulator-defensible methodology replacing inconsistent, population-based risk logic
• Clearer visibility of enterprise-wide exposure and unique risk hotspots across to global business
• A more knowledgeable client team equipped to sustain and enhance the assessment in the future