AMP has had a tumultuous past couple of years with a wide range of remedial actions in the wake of its royal commission revelations.
It was recently downgraded from fair value estimate by Morningstar who in June said the commission had been an unprecedented disaster that had tarnished the heritage brand.
The group seems set to change that with an investment boost of $100 million pre-tax over two years to further strengthen its risk, governance and controls, which includes the hiring of Anne-Marie Paterson.
Ms Paterson joins AMP from CBA where she was the executive management and whistleblower investigation officer, and will take on the group whistleblowing officer role at AMP.
“We have appointed Anne-Marie Paterson as our group whistleblowing officer in recognition of how seriously we take whistleblowing and to help people feel comfortable speaking up,” said chief risk officer Jenny Fagg.
Ms Fagg said that risk had been placed at the core of AMP’s culture and enhancing risk management and governance was a key initiative under the group’s new strategy.
“We have made significant progress to overhaul our governance and organisational structures to create better independence and oversight of issues. Our activity has focused on improving policies, processes and systems and increasing the use of technology to create efficiencies,” she said.
The group has introduced several new initiatives to improve risk management that include a new risk system to capture incident and breach information more effectively and consistently and a new process to manage regulator interactions.
AMP has also increased capacity and visibility of risk in all roles to effect cultural change and remuneration and risk committees consist of all non-executive directors.
AMP chairman David Murray is the only executive director of the audit committee, with the rest of the members being non-executive directors.
“We are delivering on our mandate to improve the way we manage risk across AMP. Our stakeholders, including our customers, expect us to manage our risk effectively and the commercial return on doing so is profound,” said Ms Fagg.
