Risk Mitigation

The strategic shift behind E&C's growing role within enterprise-wide risk management

Risk Mitigation is Rising on the E&C Agenda

Developing Foresight and Influence

As businesses navigate geopolitical volatility, regulatory uncertainty, AI prevalence, and reputational threats, the role of ethics and compliance in enterprise risk mitigation is expanding rapidly. No longer confined to reactive enforcement, today’s E&C teams are being called on to proactively identify and address emerging risks—often in real time—and guide the organization through complexity with confidence.

In 2025, effective risk mitigation is as much about foresight and influence as it is about controls and procedures.

90%

evaluate risk as part of an enterprise-wide process (ERM)

85%

evaluate E&C risk as part of a standalone, non-ERM evaluation process

Ethics & Compliance:

A Strategic Risk Partner

Leading organizations are elevating E&C from policy enforcer to strategic risk partner. Today’s most effective programs:

Integrate with enterprise risk management (ERM) frameworks
Provide board-level visibility into ethics, culture, and conduct risks
Use data to flag early warning signs and inform decisions
Partner across functions to address risk proactively, not reactively

The result? A stronger, more resilient organization—better equipped to anticipate, mitigate, and adapt to a fast-moving risk landscape.

Planning and documentation of risk assessments includes:

INNOVATIVE PRACTICES

Forward-thinking programs are also adopting emerging technologies that increase their company’s ability to detect and mitigate risk. We’ve seen programs leverage internal generative AI models to better provide employees guidance and answers to their questions in real time and “real speak” based on company policies and procedures. Other programs have built sophisticated risk dashboards that aggregate data from multiple internal and external systems to provide a constant and dynamic picture of, say, third party risk, informing audit plans, providing insight to business leaders, and supporting a cycle of continuous improvement.

Third-Party Risk

As supplier networks expand, ethics and compliance teams are under pressure to do more—faster. Evaluating third parties now requires greater rigor, smarter tools, and more bandwidth than ever before.

Read more about how ethics and compliance teams are managing rising third-party risk—amid growing complexity and limited bandwidth