Deloitte Women in Risk Advisory
We imagine new possibilities by connecting trust, resilience and security to empower the future of risk
We are the Women in Risk Advisory. We solve complex problems and foresee risks. We innovate and analyse. We incubate and referee. We help our clients build resilient, sustainable organisations. We imagine new possibilities, connecting trust, resilience and security to make an impact that matters. We need more like us. We need more like you.
Letter from Donna Glass, Deloitte Global Risk Advisory Leader
Welcome to the Global Women in Risk Advisory page of Deloitte.
We’ve made great strides over the past several decades in increasing the number of women in leadership roles, including those in risk-related fields. Although women are still underrepresented at the executive level, the gender gap is shrinking faster than ever before.
We know organisations with women as part of their leadership teams out-perform. Diversity of thought is crucial to risk management—the ability to anticipate where organisations may encounter risk can mean the difference between surviving and thriving in the face of uncertainty. An organisation must be able to think about risks through different perspectives in order to arrive at the best answer. Women with diverse backgrounds and skill sets bring unique perspective to these teams in a way that can improve decision making and build positive risk cultures.
That’s why this campaign is so important, especially now. We want to share with you the stories of some of the women from our Risk Advisory business who are a small sample of the many talented women at Deloitte. Women who bring with them a breadth of diversity across all dimensions. Through them, we can help our firm and our clients make a lasting positive impact that matters.
We need more like us. We need more like you.
Join us.
Meet the Deloitte Women in Risk Advisory featured in our campaign
The following women are representative of the professionals who make up the Risk Advisory practices across Deloitte’s network of firms. We are grateful to them for sharing their stories.
Meet Amisha Georghiou, a Senior Manager in IT and Specialised Assurance in Risk Advisory Africa. She manages and leads large complex technology assurance engagements for IT Audits, Third Party Assurance engagements and advisory projects. Amisha joined Deloitte Audit in 2008 and moved to Risk Advisory as a consultant in 2011 where she progressed to Senior Manager in 2018. Amisha is also a dedicated lead in the IT and Specialised Assurance Digital team as well as the ITSA Global innovation team, she is part of driving the strategy for ITSA. Within her role, she loves interacting with different people, meeting new people, getting different exposure to different clients and industries, working on challenging and complex engagements which require innovative ways of finding solutions, and most importantly making an impact on her team and junior staff.
She is resilient, the day-to-day tasks of being a mother and a career woman has enabled her to tend to the task at hand and keep on thriving. In her team, she is the one that always checks in and makes sure that the team is fine – they know the tasks and are comfortable. To women who want to pursue a career in Risk Advisory, be bold, be resilient and be courageous. She believes that anything is possible if you believe in yourself and don’t give up. Amisha would like to be known for being an inspirational leader and being a role model and mentor to her teams and staff and for the leader who made an impact on her team. Everything is now more digital, and more technology driven so as Risk Advisors we need to be savvier in the way we do things and innovative to grow and transform. Amisha has conversations with her clients, to ensure that they understand the impacts and recommendations as well as how to go about resolving those. In short working together to come to a solution.
Meet Bavani Chetty who leads the Cyber crisis resilient offering and is responsible for any disaster that the client might experience, from business continuity all the way to IT disaster recovery and cyber incidence response. She is the person that the client calls in the middle of the night when things don’t work the way they should, or mostly a day before a public holiday or on a Friday. Her role helps clients to prepare for the incident, prepare for the worst, and recover when it does happen. The other exciting area she enjoys is in the Audit space – she supports the team to understand whether the cyber incident is material to the financial statements. Bavani learnt from a very young age that life will always throw you curve balls, and you need to be resilient irrespective of what happens, and that there is always a way out. This has taught her to think on her feet and she tries to incorporate this into her work life, “There is a light at the end of a tunnel” that is what drives her to make sure that her clients get to that light.
As a mom and woman, she is able to multitask and remain calm, that is her superpower which is required in her role. When something happens, she is able to calmly take stock and identify the next steps – clearly her panic button is dysfunctional. She believes that women should reach for the stars – she had phenomenal men supporting her in her career so, as a woman, determine what you can and cannot do, there is always support out there. She would like to be known as the person that when the going was tough managed to take you out of that situation – serving her clients. According to Bavani Cyber is one of the global emerging risks, it is on top of every CIO list of things to look at, and her biggest lesson is communicating these risks to the client and letting them know that there is always a way out – the attacker doesn’t have to win.
Michelle leads the Cyber Risk Emerging Technologies service offering. Her service offering develops cyber solutions and services that enable our clients securely embed and leverage emerging technologies. Emerging Technologies such as the implementation of fourth Industrial revolution solutions such as Smart Factories and Mining are some of the solutions her team helps secure from cyber threat. Enhancing and supporting our client’s business growth enabling their resilience to cyber-attacks.
Passionate about enabling and empowering others, Michelle looks for opportunities to upskill others and expose them to meaningful work. She enjoys solving multidisciplinary problems and bringing different skills and capabilities to solve problems. Michelle’s strength lies in her ability to merge her people skills with systems thinking. Her team considers her as someone who directs and guides them, working with their strengths and has the ability to identify and focus on key aspects when faced with a broadly defined problem.
Rovika is a Senior Manager in Data Analytics within the Risk Advisory, focusing on Financial Crime. She is working in Financial Crime analytics helping banks to comply and mitigate the risks of money laundering or terrorist finance using analytics and data to uncover gaps with their processes and provide insight. Rovika joined Deloitte as a PA to the Directors in DA (6 Directors for 8 months). She learned coding during her spare time, and she taught herself how to visualise data. She moved from PA to Consultant (Client facing) in 2012 and in 2021 progressed to Senior Manager in Data Analytics. She always says, “A strong Data Analyst is somebody who has the ability to articulate data into business insight and solve a business problem with it.”
Rovika is very passionate about people, all she ever wants is to give other people the opportunity and allow them to prove themselves. According to Rovika, there are several emerging risks in DA, i.e., technology in terms of regulations – we have evolving regulations and we have evolving risk within the Regulatory space, with data and technology it requires us to evolve even faster, use more advanced analytics and technology to do what is important. Deloitte Risk Advisory is constantly finding different ways of mitigating risks and provides risks with solutions.
Meet Ibukun. Ibukun is the business leader for the Accounting & Internal Controls Governance, Regulatory, and Compliance offerings for Deloitte Nigeria. With more than 16 years of experience with Deloitte, Ibukun is well-versed in developing effective risk management and governance frameworks for clients, while also helping them identify emerging risks—and potentially leveraging them as an advantage. “Risk asks what is positive and what is negative,“ she says. “There are challenges to solve, but also opportunities to explore.“
Ibukun enjoys working digging into her clients’ toughest challenges, whether that’s communicating a corporate governance strategy to board members or evolving governance from a structured system to an intelligent system that can evolve with the organization. “I love when I check back in with clients and they’re still seeing results. When my clients are happy, I’m happy.“
She describes one project where she worked with one of the top telecommunications companies in Africa to implement a regulatory compliance framework in their Lagos location, which led to another project to automate how they monitored the regulatory space. This enabled the client to manage emerging risks much more effectively, and they decided to replicate the automation process in their West Africa jurisdiction, too. Ibukun considers this a “milestone project“ within her business area, as well as “a major breakthrough“ that helped her move to the next level of her career.
bukun’s diligence and guidance easily extend beyond her clients, and she relishes opportunities to serve as a coach and mentor to other women in Risk Advisory through Deloitte Africa’s sponsorship program. “At Deloitte, women have the support we need to attain the highest levels of professional achievement,“ Ibukun says. However, she believes we still need more women in Risk—that they bring a “great energy“ to the space, thanks to an ability to problem-solve, empathize, and multi-task.
“I’m proud to be a woman in Risk, to lead in this space,“ she says. “And I’m excited to support other women navigating this environment and share my experiences.“
We need more like Ibukun.
We need more like you.
Nicky is an Associate Director (AD) in the Regulatory Space within Risk Advisory, she joined Deloitte as an AD in 2019. Nicky and her team look at current and upcoming regulations as well as the functions that look after them. As much as this might be the less interesting space, with topics and regulations changing this is certainly becoming an interesting space and this move away from a typical compliance role. Everyday is different, every engagement is different and that is a motivation to see how the team can do things efficiently and see the value the team brings to the client’s different needs. Driving a team that sees through the process and come up with valuable solution brings an enormous reward, learning and knowledge to her.
“To women out there, do not give up, whatever you do, do it the best way you can , get perspective and do not be too hard on yourself when you do not get it right” - Nicky.She would like to be know as a person who had a good balance, dedication and quality at the forefront of her career but not at the expense of her family. Have fun along the way. The lack of the correct skills set to take compliance to the next level in the compliance space is an emerging risk that Nicky highlighted. Clients are aware that demands on compliance going forward are changing and are not going to be what they have been traditionally. Helping the client to unpack the compliance and skills sets that are required to progress their compliance capabilities is what Nicky and her team aim for.
Nompumelelo joined Deloitte in 2021 as a Senior Manager in the Risk Advisory service line, particularly for Regulatory Risk Management. Her role involves being able conceptualise solutions to client problems, working within the framework of the relevant regulatory landscape that clients find themselves in. Some of the problems Nompumelelo works on are structural while some are programmatic or even strategic, and this requires her to be able to listen to clients, understand their regulatory landscapes and provide advice, solutions, and recommendations on how to address those problems. She is passionate about finding solutions and using the law to find those solutions for a project.
The best part of her job is applying the law to design. When growing up she was advised that she could either pursue a career that required her to be procedurally inclined or creative, with no opportunity to marry the two, in this way, Regulatory Risk Management has been the best decision as it’s an application of law that requires both procedural and creative strength. She Studied Social Sciences as well as an LLB with electives in Consumer, Intellectual Property, and International Trade Law. The advice that she’d share with aspiring and fellow risk advisors is that “we need to accept that risk is a palatable part of doing business and approach our discipline in such a way that it can enable business as opposed to being the reason that the business is restrained”. Nompumelelo would like to be known for pushing the bar for transformative compliance – making sure that the regulatory compliance is used as a business enabler, compliance risks are too often considered at the last moment and seen as having restrictive value to business, as opposed to being considered at the beginning of design and used to frame business opportunities.
Read Ibukun's blog post as she discusses her journey into Risk Advisory
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