Last Thursday, February 2nd, the headquarters of the AEP Foundation hosted the event “Controlling Risk – A perspective on risks for organizations in 2023”.
Through the presentation of the project, C2R – Control to Risk, Sérgio Resende, CEO of RMP and C2R, opened the doors of the first risk observatory in Portugal. “Control to Risk is in fact a fundamental program that responds to the needs of companies in the face of risk. C2R brings more information and better decision-making capacity to companies that want to manage their risks and that is why the AEP Foundation welcomed this project from the outset”, said Luís Miguel Ribeiro, President of the AEP Foundation.
To better understand the national reality and the threats to the business network in Portugal, the study that led to the report “TOP RISCOS 2023 – A vision on the level of risk for the year 2023” was presented with the ten main risks for organizations. In this study, the observatory anticipates and describes the trends and main risks for this year, also presenting a view of the exposure of organizations in Portugal, obtained from national managers.
RTP journalist Patrícia Cracel moderated the debate focused on the main impacts of the risks present in the study, where Paulo Pinheiro, Credit Director – Medium Companies at Banco BPI, stated that “the evolution of the economy in the near future is a huge uncertainty”. The last two years of the pandemic have affected the world economy, and in Portugal “they were two years of very robust growth, higher than pre-pandemic, something we did not believe was possible and at this moment we have doubts whether we will be able to escape an economic contraction already in the first quarter of the year”.
For companies like Mota Engil, which practice risk management with a dedicated department, the threats of previous years saw their impact minimized. In the case of the construction company, it was even possible to double the order book compared to the year before the pandemic. However, this increase in the number of projects implies greater investment, which in many companies can be difficult to obtain, “there may be some difficulty in accessing financing even though this scenario is more diluted than it was a few months ago”, replied Filipe Guerra, Global Head of Risk and Compliance at Mota Engil.
Another issue that stood out during the debate was the risk perception of the new generations of managers and administrators who are starting their careers. Agostinho Sousa Pinto, Member of the Technical-Scientific Council and Vice-President of ISCAP, underlined the difficulty that many companies face when recruiting young talent, since their concern is based on the risk of their personal day-to-day. For many, the risk is still seen as “a hassle”. However, due to the exposure to risks that companies face, there is an increasing need to manage risk through anticipation, “we need to identify, qualify, quantify the probability and impact that it will have if it happens and in this matrix it is that we identify where companies should be focused”, said the Vice President of ISCAP.
