The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

The importance of risk management practices, business continuity planning (BCP) and regulatory compliance were highlighted at a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) seminar.

Bruce Scott, partner in charge of risk assurance for the accounting firm’s Caribbean region, said that while businesses are faced with much uncertainty, customers are reliant on them to be stable.

“Companies that take the time to formally identify disruptions and put strategies in place will perform better than the competition,” said Mr Scott told the on ‘Better risk management, better business performance’ seminar.

“Hurricane Matthew is a good example of a disruption,” he added. “We spoke to six Bahamian companies after the storm and they admitted that didn’t realise that their IT systems were not as robust as they thought. They struggled to quickly account for how their staff would start work and just simply trying to reach them.”

Caroline Bell-Wisdom, a PwC Jamaica partner in risk assurance practice, told Tribune Business: “Ninety per cent of businesses that have a disaster actually do not get back in business or don’t recover after two years.

“Forty per cent of those still fail after that two-year period, so even if they are able to get back on the ground there may have been such a great fall-out from the destruction they don’t manage to stay in business. It’s a major issue and is something that we have even seen in our own local environment.”

Myra Lundy-Mortimer, a partner at PwC Bahamas, told Tribune Business: “Most businesses are taking risk managment seriously; it’s really whether the right framework was in place to address such instances like Hurricane Matthew.

“We feel that based on our clients all of them were prepared to a certain extent, but recognised that there may have been improvements required to get back up and running after Hurricane Matthew.”