Sound risk management is one of the key pillars of support for a strategy of sustainable profitable growth and therefore a core competency at Fortis. Fortis relies upon a strong risk management framework for several reasons: to ensure that it maintains consistently high standards of risk management, to raise executive management’s awareness and understanding of the risks being taken, to encourage optimisation of the risk/return ratio and to measure group-wide economic capital. The risk management framework resides at all levels within the group.

Fortis executes its risk strategy and undertakes controlled risk-taking activities within its risk management framework. This framework combines core policies and methods and process design with broad oversight and is supported by risk performance monitoring at group and local business level. Fortis continuously reviews and upgrades its risk management framework in order to align its long-term strategy in the field with lessons learned through its own and general best practices. The following figure shows the Fortis risk governance framework.

Each of the interrelated components of the risk governance framework is described in this section, including a quantitative and qualitative overview of Fortis’ risk exposure.