How Volkswagen Navigated Its Compliance Monitorship
Hiltrud Werner, former head of integrity and legal affairs at VW, describes how BCG helped the company through a fundamental crisis.
Risk management and compliance can do more than mitigate threats and safeguard a company’s operations and reputation—it can create value. Our risk and compliance consulting team helps clients turn uncertainty into opportunity.
We view risk management and compliance through a wide-angle lens. While our teams are skilled at applying technical solutions to immediate problems, our focus isn’t simply “putting out fires” but rather on supporting management decision making. By identifying systemic or structural issues, we help organizations across all industries become more ethical and resilient—and more competitive—in ways that a narrower, less strategic assessment of risk and compliance could not achieve. The improvements are innovative, fundamental, and lasting.
Compliance and Crisis Management
We believe in data-driven, technology enabled compliance risk management that puts talent and culture at the center while optimizing and maturing corporate compliance operations.
Credit Risk Management
We help build advanced end-to-end credit processes to enhance clients’ efficiency while substantially improving the quality of credit decisions.
Commodity Risk Management
We work with clients to manage financial risk and compliance across the production supply chain. We start by quantifying the spectrum of trading-related, operational, and strategic risks.
Cybersecurity and Digital Risk
We blend technical expertise with risk management processes and controls to reduce our clients’ vulnerability while boosting their capacity for rapid response and recovery.
Climate Risk, Adaptation, and Resilience
We help clients accelerate their transition to net zero and ESG conformity. We support measurement and scenario analysis and integrate ESG principles into risk management and compliance practices.
Risk Advanced Analytics and Technology
We work with clients to develop best-in-class analytics solutions and support better risk management and compliance decision making.
Balance Sheet Management
Our risk and compliance consulting team uses a holistic approach to balance sheet, funding, and liquidity management to achieve superior results from a risk-return perspective.
Operational Risk Management
We help clients establish clear guardrails to reduce the likelihood of reputational damage or regulatory penalties.
We provide strategic, transformational, and technical offerings in risk and compliance, which include—but also extend well beyond—financial risk consulting and compliance consulting. We take a comprehensive view of financial and non-financial risks, including operational and strategic risks. This enables us to help our clients grow their businesses while staying ahead of key risks, anticipating regulatory shifts, and instilling ethical practices—all of which helps earn the trust of employees, stakeholders, investors, and the public.
Hiltrud Werner, former head of integrity and legal affairs at VW, describes how BCG helped the company through a fundamental crisis.
Automotive Industry
A world-leading automobile manufacturer engaged us to design and roll out their global integrity and compliance program. This tremendous transformation program was built on two key pillars: implementing processes and inspiring people. The program strengthened governance and processes: more than ten functional initiatives were rolled out across more than 500 legal entities across the globe. In addition, all company employees have been actively engaged along the journey via a diverse set of communication, training, information, and enablement initiatives—embarking on the path to achieving sustainable culture change.
Payments and Transactions Banking
A market-leading merchant acquirer with a strong footprint in travel and airlines engaged our risk management and compliance and payments teams for immediate crisis response, gaining strength and resilience while continuing to onboard new clients even in the midst of the crisis. We reduced the client’s exposure by more than one-third and expected loss by approximately 85% during the crisis, while doubling the profitability per transaction volume in high-risk verticals.
Energy Industry
Utilities have been severely impacted by dramatically elevated market volatility in European gas and power prices. For a leading utility, BCG identified >€5B of reduced liquidity exposure through a rebalanced gas and power portfolio. We simulated and defined an adjusted hedging strategy, recalibrating the triangle of market, credit, and liquidity risk, and improved financing structures to significantly improve working capital.
Insurance Industry
For a regional life insurer, we reworked the company’s balance sheet management framework and optimized the balance sheet and capital position through a targeted set of initiatives. The project took the company from losing money to profitable within a few months, and it set the firm up to earn a double-digit return on capital over the coming years.
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Our risk and compliance consulting experts couple deep technical expertise with strategic orientation, working shoulder-to-shoulder with clients through their toughest crises and compliance risk management challenges. We stay a step ahead, ensuring our clients are prepared for tomorrow.