Following our Breakfast Briefing, we asked guest speaker Remi Adebonojo, FCMI, some questions about Brexit programmes.
On 24th April 2018, Fourthline hosted an event at London’s Sky Garden on the topic of ‘Creating and delivering your Brexit programme’. Our guest speaker Remi Adebonojo, FCMI, guided the discussion to help our attendees understand the skill sets needed to create the best contingency plans and mobilise a programme delivery team.
Following the event, we caught up with Remi to find out more about the challenges of preparing for Brexit from a financial services perspective.
Why is creating your Brexit programme important at this time?
What happened in the past with regulatory change programmes was that firms have waited until the deadline is looming to actually start work, but with Brexit, as it’s a political initiative, you’re not going to get the level of clarity required to deliver when you need to so the idea is to focus on your worst-case scenario now.
There is a lot of change required, so you are going to have to consider whether you look at things such as authorisation. You’re going to have to look at it from an operational perspective as well, so what is your legal entity model going to be? How will you go about delivering on that? All of these things are going to take time, so you’ll need to start working on them now.
To what extent do you think firms are engaged on their Brexit plans?
There is a wide gap between firms at the moment. The bigger firms have done a lot of work and are fully engaged on it, whilst a lot of the smaller firms still haven’t decided what approach to take on Brexit, whilst some haven’t even started to look at it. That gap is what we’re looking at now and trying to resolve so that we can move things forward. I would say that firms are not 100% committed or focused on it yet, but over the next few months there will be a lot work started on it.
To mobilise an effective Brexit program, what skills sets do you think will be most important?
Like regulatory change programmes that have gone in the past, you will need someone who can bring all of this together. There will be several deliverables that you’ll need to co-ordinate, so you'll need a very strong project manager or programme manager, who can look at things end-to-end. You’ll also need people to support them, such as PMOs.
Business Analysts who can understand the work that needs to be done, perform gap analyses on that work, and understand the operating models and design new ones will also be required. You need people from a legal background who can look at jurisdictions and negotiate contracts, and you’ll also need to bring HR to the table to look at resourcing and where resources will be based. And of course, you’ll need people from a technology background to look at this and understand what technology you require to move this forward.
Thank you Remi!
