Mastering Risk Management Podcast · Anthony Wilson

MRM Episode 121 - Jim Wetekamp

·36 min·2 clips

Jim Wetekamp names three habits for early-career risk people: keep learning, stay outcome-focused, and build trust instead of being "the office of no."

1. Episode 121 of the Mastering Risk Management Podcast features Risk Connect CEO Jim Wetekamp on integrated risk management software, which he says helps organizations treat risk as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance exercise. 2. Host Anthony Wilson, whose firm is involved in OBM Risk Partnership software sourcing, interviews Wetekamp, who joined Risk Connect in 2018 and began as a product manager after dropping an art school plan because he "liked income." 3. Wetekamp's central thesis is "risk under one roof," meaning fractured risk data and disjointed workflows from frontline to back office should be unified and turned into action with AI. 4. He describes three domains: operational risk (hazards, property damage, "slip trip and fall"), corporate and regulatory compliance, and a separate resilience domain focused on shrinking recovery time and the amplitude of interruptions. 5. On rollout, he says Risk Connect is agile, low-code or no-code, and cloud native, so clients mainly approve configuration guidelines and help with acceptance testing while the company handles data like incident histories, control libraries, and M&A-driven hierarchies, the "glacier underneath the water." 6. He explains that risk assessments score probability and impact before and after controls, and that KPIs for a new market, product line, or acquisition should map to key risk indicators such as onboarding failure rates or regulations tripped. 7. For multi-division companies, he says scoring is normalized through a weighting exercise based on financial, human capital, or asset exposure, so that defense versus consumer retail risk rolls up the same way performance does. 8. Wetekamp says opportunity risk mostly lives outside systematic tools today because, in a "CFO driven cost control environment," ROI is judged on loss reduction and operational efficiency. 9. Wilson recounts a client asking "why is the risk guy telling us to take more risk?", and Wetekamp responds that avoiding a decision creates "a different kind of risk"; he also notes Risk Connect has about 1,400 people and 2,700 clients. 10. Suited to risk managers, CROs, and software buyers evaluating risk platforms.

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