I give this talk about Risk Management called The Top 8 Reasons You Have a Fraud Problem. I learn a lot from the way audiences respond to it, mostly from objections. Most commonly, objections tell me how risk managers paint themselves into a corner in day-to-day work, effectively limiting their ability to drive change or participate in key business decisions.

How do they do that?

First, they make losses their one and only benchmark. It’s easy to focus on reducing losses when the business is taking hits, it’s your job and it’s what’s expected of you. But overcompensating and focusing on aggressive loss reduction whenever possible, while rejecting troves of good customers, will not only limits your business’s growth prospects – it turns the risk manager into a single-issue player. Revenue enablement must be a core KPI for the risk team or it will lose relevance.

Second, risk managers focus on maintaining status quo. When one lacks tools and methods to control their environment, their first response is to try to make sure that nothing ever changes. It’s not the risk team’s job to say no to everything new; it’s their job to find a way to say yes. That’s where the technological and organizational edge is. Find ways to enable new business by shifting risk across your portfolio and finding detection and prevention solutions that support even the craziest marketing ideas. You may flail at first but long-term, you’re building an important muscle.

Last, they tend to distrust the customer. It makes sense – when faced mainly (and often solely) with the malfunctions of the operation, often caused by customers themselves, one tends to stop believing in people’s good intention. That starts becoming a problem when every product design process turns into a theoretical cat-and-mouse game where every possible abuse opportunity must be curbed in advance. You should let users be users, and that means that there will be breakage and there will be losses. Zero losses can easily be achieved by stopping all activity in your system; you should accept that some customers will be bad and find a way to detect these as they act in your system, rather than limit every customer’s ability to use your product.

As I often write, risk teams are multidisciplinary and must think about operations, data science, product design and more. Whenever one focuses on limiting risk instead of trusting users, challenging the status quo and enabling new business, they are contributing to turning risk into a control function, a technocratic add-on that doesn’t deserve a seat at the decision makers’ table. Make sure that’s not you.

(If you want to read some concrete advice on how to do that, take a look at my free eBook here)