Unveiling Risk Management: A Journey from Experience to Expertise

Father of the two most beautiful girls in the universe, lucky husband, method addicted, teamwork fan, lifelong learner and a proud nerd.

Lawyer, board member, professor and executive with experience in the financial market for over 25 years, currently part of the Compliance area at Banco Santander Brasil S/A.

Previously, executive director of Banco Ol© Consignado S/A and general counsel of Banco Bonsucesso S/A (currently Banco BS2), and worked at law firms.

I started my career very early, at the age of 14, as an assistant at a law firm, and this first job ended up defining the path of my professional journey: I decided, based on what I saw in the office, to enter Law University at the age of 17, and I was a lawyer–first hired and then partner–at law firms, for the first seven years of my professional career.

After this first cycle, I migrated to the corporate world, where I have been for the last few years, for the first 14 years in the legal world (where I ended up holding the position of general counsel in two financial institutions) and for the last four years in the compliance universe.

At law school, we learn a lot about laws, theories and doctrines, but very little–or almost nothing, in fact–about management or risk management.

What I know about risk management, from a technical perspective, is that I learned by reading, studying, and especially in practice, making mistakes and getting them right.

Looking back and retrospectively, I come to the conclusion, however, that we were all born with at least one risk manager instinct.

Good risk management involves, at a minimum, the following steps:

(a) Choose the process that needs to be handled;

(b) Define the context that needs to be faced;

(c) Identify the risks involved;

(d) Analyze and evaluate the risks involved; and

(e) Establish an action plan to mitigate these risks and follow the results of that plan: if it works, start monitoring and, if it fails, replan and follow the results until it works.

Now, analyzing these steps, I can say –at least in the first person, but I am convinced that this conclusion applies to the almost absolute majority of people–that we end up doing this, with more or less refinement, in our daily lives, in our birth until the end of our days.

Obviously, and bringing this narrative to the corporate world, we were able to enhance this management with the use of technological tools, such as the massive–and assertive–use of data, machine learning and other possibilities such as GenAI (and here we have a new world of possibilities to explore).

Managing Risk is not easy; it is a task in constant and necessary evolution (risks improve daily), but it is a mission for which I am convinced that we are all born with the necessary seed and instinct to be cultivated and trained.