Unicorn Training recognises that risk management has evolved over the years, influenced by challenging economic climates, evolving technological threats and lessons learned from past crises. The financial services regulators and other organisations, such as the Bank of England, constantly review and evaluate the risks to firms and economic stability. From this, they produce regulations, rules, and guidance to be followed. The way firms manage risk has a direct impact on operational resilience and, as a result, the two work hand in hand.

Risk management is concerned with the identification of risks followed by the coordination of actions affecting their impact and/or probability.

Every firm takes risks as part of its business strategy. These must be adequately controlled, so the senior management of all firms must be able to identify all the risks that it wants or needs to take and - through appointed risk managers - ensure there are processes in place to manage these risks effectively. However, it takes everyone in a firm to manage these risks; it's not all down to the risk management team alone.

For example, every department should have a risk-control framework that identifies the risks associated with the work that the department does. The framework specifies the processes, policies and procedures in place and the roles people have in that framework.

Operational resilience is an outcome, something to strive for. This is key to the Bank of England’s mission to maintain financial stability.

Operational resilience can be defined as the ability of firms – and the financial system – to prevent, adapt, respond to, recover, and learn from operational disruption. It requires firms to not only minimise the likelihood of an incident occurring and causing a disruption, but also to assume that disruption will occur – and to have robust responses and recovery processes in place.

Unicorn's Risk and Operational resilience course will provide learners with

• an introduction to risk management
• the systems and controls used to manage risk
• an opportunity to try their hand at using a risk register to determine how risk in their role should be managed
• a case study of risk in practice, with questions on what the learner thinks should have been done to reduce risk
• a definition of operational resilience and how firms can help achieve resilience aims and objectives