Three Lines of Defense
Insights into the challenges and trends at Swiss Insurance companies
At a glance
- Project leader : Dr. Angela Zeier Röschmann
- Project team : Sebastian Barth
- Project status : completed
- Funding partner : Third party (MAZARS SA)
- Project partner : MAZARS SA
- Contact person : Angela Zeier Röschmann
Description
Lessons from the financial crisis and growing demands on company
management have increasingly placed qualitative and organisational
aspects of risk management at financial institutions under the
spotlight. In order for a governance system to achieve the desired
operational capability, financial institutions must ensure that the
control functions constantly exchange information and work closely
together. As a result of the paper published by the Institute of
Internal Auditors (IIA, 2013), the Three Lines of Defence model has
achieved widespread recognition and established itself
internationally as a concept for organisational embedding of
control functions and interaction between the various operational
units.
However, in Switzerland there has been no investigation to date of
the concrete application of the model, its implementation in the
insurance industry and the experience gained as a result. In this
project, 12 experts were questioned in personal interviews, and 35
insurance companies asked about the benefits of the Three Lines of
Defence model, its implementation and their experiences to date by
means of standardized, online questionnaires.