Podcast S9E4 | Greeks, Romans & Risk Management with Lucy Morley

TRANSCRIPT

Kimberley Cole 0:01
This is Risky Women Radio, a show that connects, celebrates and champions women in risk regulation and compliance. We’re here to share the insights on the biggest issues in our industry and hear inspiring journeys from our global members. Sign up to our newsletter at riskywomen.org. I’m Kimberley Cole, your Chief Risky Woman.

Kimberley Cole 0:21
Welcome to Risky Women Radio, today’s risky woman is a chief credit officer, chief risk officer and the co founder of Tint Financial Services, a London based cross border FinTech specializing in trade finance for SMEs. Since founding Tint in 2022 she and the team have taken the venture from initial concept to facilitating over 65 million in cross border trade, building a robust risk framework and securing wholesale funding lines whilst preparing for the next stage of its expansion, bringing over 20 years of financial services expertise, spanning credit risk, leverage finance and portfolio management. She’s held roles in leveraged finance at Crédit Agricole, CIT Bank, Bank of Ireland and the RBF. Certified under the FCA senior managers certification regime, she also has a proven track record in building high performing teams and transforming organizational culture. A fellow of the Chartered Institute of Credit Management and committee member of its technical committee. She also serves as a trustee on the board of Thame Partnership Academy Trust. She holds a first class BA in Classical Studies from Royal Holloway, and BSc in financial services from Manchester University, and a winner of the Risky Women Write competition in 2025. Welcome Lucy Morley.

Lucy Morley 1:47
What a lovely introduction. Thank you

Kimberley Cole 1:49
Pleasure. So first, tell us a little bit about Tint Financial Services.

Lucy Morley 1:54
So Tint started up in 2022 it’s a startup financial services company designed specifically to help SMEs with cross border trade. So it’s obviously a huge, huge market in itself, but the SMEs are quite under serviced, actually. So we wanted to do something that would help them specifically to enable them to be able to trade, to help them with their cash flow, to be able to trade.

Kimberley Cole 2:18
Brilliant, brilliant. And we’re going to talk a bit more about, obviously, your article, but you started your article with your classics background, and I’m just curious, when you tell people in financial services that you studied classical civilization, what’s their reaction?

Lucy Morley 2:36
More of a look, to be honest, I think to be honest, I think a lot of people don’t actually believe me. It gets a funny look, but, yeah, I always get a funny look, and it’s always fun for me.

Kimberley Cole 2:46
And do you think that having that humanities background gives you a sort of secret superpower for risk and governance?

Lucy Morley 2:52
Less of a secret but I do think it’s undervalued, actually. Humanities training you get when you’re studying it develops all the skills that you do need for a career in risk, to be honest. So if you think about causation and how someone trained in history or classics learns that events very rarely have a single cause, so there’s a sort of layered interplay of structural factors or individual decisions and timing and contingency things like that, which is exactly what you would look at when you’re looking at a risk scenario or investigating what went wrong. So I think that, I think also, there’s something to be said for being trained in reading texts critically. So you’d get that from, you know, any of the humanities, English, or all the histories, because if you’re looking at any kind of information, you’re analyzing the information, develop an instinct for what’s not being said sometimes, which you get in the ancient Roman sort of rhetoric, what assumptions are embedded and what the argument is trying to achieve. So it’s not just about what’s written on the piece of paper in front of you. It’s sometimes reading between the lines as well, which is invaluable if you’re looking at board paper or a credit paper or whatever. So I do think the skills that you learn in humanities lend themselves brilliantly to financial services and risk, which isn’t really quite promoted, and not anything I’d have thought about really previously, but when the article, the Risky Women article, you’ve put it on LinkedIn. So I sent it to one of my friends, who’s a Roman history lecturer, and she shared it with her network who are all you know, a lot of her students and her colleagues to just demonstrate exactly how the skills that they’re learning can take them anywhere. So I’ve not what I thought of at all, but really nice actually, that she shared it, and you think, yeah, you learn all these skills, and then it’s just about applying them isn’t it?

Kimberley Cole 4:48
Absolutely, absolutely. So tell us a bit about your career journey and sort of all those highlights that you’ve had along the way.

Lucy Morley 4:56
So I started with my class six degrees. Started on the graduate scheme at RBS, and had, you know, a number of sort of workshops and assessment days and things to go through to get onto graduate scheme and interviews. And actually, when I started working at RBS, one of the people that had interviewed me was still entertained that I talked him into it with my classics degree. Actually, the graduate scheme at RBS, they did a really good job with it. They really looked after us. They really made sure we bonded so that we could all be sort of, they were thinking, you’re future leaders together, but actually they did a really good job. So that was a definite highlight. Was the graduate scheme at RBS. I went from there to leveraged finance, and like you said, I worked in a number of the big banks in leveraged finance, which, I mean, I loved it. I mean, it’s very fast paced, but you just learn everything there is to learn about the most random companies. So you discover this widget manufacturer, it makes billions making something you’ve never heard of, and you learn everything there is to learn about them. Or then you’ll do Formula One, or, you know, the lottery, or things you have heard of, you get so entrenched in because it’s obviously cash flow lending. So you have to sort of be able to understand where the business is going, and you can only do that by really understanding everything about it. So I did leveraged finance was really good fun. And then I took a couple of years out, after my last maternity leave to do professional photography for a very good fine art photography studio, which’s got nothing to do with banking, but I absolutely loved it, so I spent a few years doing that. And actually, bizarrely, a wedding shoot is way more stressful than anything I’ve ever done dealing with billions of pounds and a wedding shoots worse. Get paid a lot less, but I did really enjoy it. And then I spent the last 10 years in trade finance. So firstly, sort of doing receivables financing, and then more recently, doing the sort of true import, export trade finance with Tint. And obviously starting up our own company has been hard, but you’ve seen it and done it. It’s, you know, it’s always very rewarding to do.

Kimberley Cole 7:07
Oh, I love that reinvention and reshaping what you’re doing as well. That’s fantastic. What’s the hardest decision that you’ve made then that you think has sort of shaped that career trajectory?

Lucy Morley 7:19
I mean, the obvious one is, you know, leaving a salaried role to do a startup. It’s a difficult decision. I finished my last role, but then was interviewing with other banks, and then ultimately chose to pursue the startup instead. So you’ve got that uncertainty, which is tough, starting from scratch, but ultimately it’s what’s hugely catapulted my career. It’s made a huge difference in terms of learning and pushing me forward. So I’d say that’s probably the most obvious one. But then the other one is taking the career break. That’s a very difficult decision to do, definitely been detrimental to my career, to take the career break, but it was right for me at the time, I was in leveraged finance. I’ve said about it being fast paced. It’s long hours and unpredictable hours. You can turn up one morning and not know if you’re completing a deal that day and you’re going to be until four in the morning, which just wasn’t really very kind with a young family. So I found out in covid, this is terrible, that my youngest was waking up when I was going into the office. I was getting up at five in the morning. She would wake up at five in the morning to come in and see me before I went to work, so that she got to see me. Think, oh, that’s just and she was a baby, you know? She was really little, yeah. So actually, I took a few years out, very difficult decision, really fun, and I’ve always got lovely photos of my family and lovely photos of my family as a result that new skill. But yeah, not the easiest decision to make.

Kimberley Cole 8:48
Yeah, yeah, interesting. And yeah, that’s difficult, but yeah, it seems like you’ve got to make some of those choices.

Lucy Morley 8:54
Yes of course.

Kimberley Cole 8:56
Exactly.

Lucy Morley 8:57
They play into how you turn out ultimately, don’t they? They’re all they’re all good news in the end.

Kimberley Cole 9:04
Yeah, exactly. And what’s the best piece of advice that you’ve ever been given?

Lucy Morley 9:12
There’s obviously so much, there’s so many clever people out there aren’t there, and so many clever people that you work with that are really inspiring. But the one thing that really sticks. If it’s got to be an outstanding piece of advice is financial services specific? If it was your money, would you lend it?

Kimberley Cole 9:26
Yeah.

Lucy Morley 9:27
Which I think is just a good rule. You know, always when you’re doing anything to do with banking or financial services.

Kimberley Cole 9:35
Yeah, definitely.

Kimberley Cole 9:38
This episode is brought to you by Kroll. Stay ahead with Kroll. As the leading independent provider of financial and Risk Advisory solutions, Kroll leverages their unique insights, data and technology to help clients stay ahead of complex demands.

Kimberley Cole 9:57
What’s the change that you hope that your leadership ultimately leaves behind, so ultimately, whether that’s in people, culture or the profession?

Lucy Morley 10:06
So I’m really passionate. I’ve worked in places where there maybe haven’t been such good cultures. I’m really passionate that healthy cultures are not just important because it’s right to be decent and human. But actually it’s not a trade off for high performance. They’re prerequisites for one another. So I think it’s so important. And I think that genuinely healthy cultures where you’re present and a genuine collaboration, and also including people you don’t know where the best idea is going to come from, it could come from the youngest person on the team, the newest person on the team. And if you haven’t got the culture to include them and make them feel heard and seen and that they matter, you’re not going to hear their ideas. So they’ll only speak up if the culture matters, and that’s for positive reasons, if they’ve got a great new idea for something positive, but also protecting the business, if they feel they need to speak up because something’s not quite right. So if you’ve got a healthy, decent workplace, people will speak up. People will challenge decisions. You’ll catch problems before they become an issue, and that sort of psychological safety means people also make better decisions to deliver the strategy. So I think that healthy culture is not at odds with delivering and the sort of high performance. It’s how you deliver the strategy, to be honest.

Kimberley Cole 11:29
Yeah, I think culture. I just did a predictions article for a company called Imperio. And you know, what are those themes? Etc. Obviously, everything comes through with AI and da da da but still, at the heart of it, and everything that we hear from all the risky women remains sort of that cultural element being just fundamental.

Lucy Morley 11:51
Yeah, of course. And also it’s the right thing to do as well. You know, human decency, it’s the right thing. But it’s, yeah, I think it’s so important. And you see it when it’s not working, and the problems that happened because of a bad culture. It’s almost the biggest risk to a business not having that culture. We keep saying healthy. It’s a funny word to use, but it’s the right one.

Kimberley Cole 12:13
So let’s talk about your article, which was fabulous and called the Myth Makers Guide to GRC, Greeks, Romans and Risk Management. So here’s what our judges said. Our judges said, superb writing style, interesting angle, strong educational benefit for non risk. This was such a fun read and made the point for why we need GRC better than any regulated speech I have ever read. The article excels in originality by transforming classical myths into vivid GRC parables that both entertain and enlighten. The relatable narratives and clear analogies capture attention and distill complex risk principles into memorable lessons. So I suggest everyone reads it, but I think they’re going to get a bit of education, even on the call, because we’re going to move through a lot of different Greek gods and Roman mythology and stories, so you’re probably going to have to try to keep up. So our first theme we’re talking about is god’s governance and power. So you describe Zeus rise as a hostile takeover with surprisingly good governance outcomes. So what did Zeus understand about power that many modern leaders still struggle with?

Lucy Morley 13:31
I think this one, power sharing isn’t a weakness, so you’re maximizing everyone’s strengths. The old adage, the sum is always greater than the individual parts. I think that’s absolutely right with any kind of team of senior leadership, but also bringing the people on board and giving them real authority stops them trying to work against you. So then you’re all pulling in the same direction. Because people aren’t trying to fight their corner or show their ego, you’re all pulling together. I think if you’ve got those sort of clear spheres of influence, it also means you’ve got less conflict over jurisdiction, which you see often on a not often you do, sometimes see on a panel of senior leaders, and then ultimately, which is definitely not relevant to Zeus, who is immortal, but creating a system means the governance will outlive the individual. So I think there’s a number of reasons why that matters.

Kimberley Cole 14:26
And Pandora’s Box, you obviously mentioned. It’s a neat metaphor for innovation. So why do we keep opening new boxes without really wanting to know what’s inside?

Lucy Morley 14:38
There’s there’s a lot to this, actually, how much Pandora could tell us. The person opening the box in that metaphor, is rarely the person that’s going to clean up the mess. So you know you’re launching something new, you get the bonuses for rolling out the new platform. When it turns out to have an issue, it’s a different person cleaning it up. It’s the risk team or the legal team or CEO’s problem in front of regulators. So the costs are sort of socialized. I’m not sure this is the right way around, but the sort of opening of the box is all very public and celebratory, and the closing down of the box is quite negative against you. So, but mainly it’s two different people doing it. So if you’re the leader that’s saying, let’s think about this before adoption, it looks like an obstacle. So your competitor would launch first, and they’d get the headlines and they’d get the market share for doing it, for example. Even if their box releases chaos, they’ve still already established it. So you’re the dinosaur who kind of missed the opportunity, if you like. So the only thing worse than opening a Pandora’s Box is someone else getting credit for doing it, if you like, which you’re the prudent one and you’ve avoided the risks, but they’ve got the show of having done it all and the credit for having done it. So the market dynamics punish the caution in some ways more than they punish the recklessness.

Kimberley Cole 16:01
And if Pandora were around today, what kind of risk would be escaping first?

Lucy Morley 16:06
Well, I definitely think technological, it’s all moving so quickly, so I’m very pro AI. I think it’s amazing, but it needs guardrails. The technologies are evolving quicker than the guidelines. You can’t put them in place fast enough, almost. So I think that would definitely be in the box again. You’re not going to not open the box. You’re always going to open that box. It’s just being prepared for how to manage what comes out of it, and how to mitigate the risk and put the guardrails in place, really.

Kimberley Cole 16:38
And next we move on to Icarus. So Icarus knew the rules and broke them anyway. So why is ignoring known limits, such as such a recurring human behavior?

Lucy Morley 16:49
Well, I think partly because when you push a boundary, it doesn’t produce an immediate consequence. So you do something, you push it a little bit, and nothing much happens, and then you do it bit more and nothing much happens. And then all of a sudden, you’ve got catastrophic failure. But in that while you’re pushing, it’s not instantly bad. So So I was looking at it for like, if you’re relating it to financial services, if you exceed a position once you make money. So you might do it again, if you’re a loan officer who bypasses the credit procedure for a good customer, you get repaid. So you do it five more times, so the successful violation almost recalibrates your sense of where the real limit is. So I think you do push it, so by the time the consequences arrive, you’re so far past the original boundary that, like your wax isn’t softening at all. It’s totally liquefied. You’re in free fall, yeah, so I think that’s why.

Kimberley Cole 17:45
And organizations kind of encourage that. Icarus style taking from your perspective?

Lucy Morley 17:51
Well, I think they’re getting better, to be honest. But if you look at where things have gone wrong in the past, there’s the compensation structures or promotion criteria, targets and where resources allocated, cultural signaling, if you like. So I think in the past, when things have gone wrong, it has been because it’s slightly been promoted by the business. I do love AI, so I put this question into AI for fun, just to see what it said. And it came up with the Icarus organization, and it said, Daedelus, here are the wings, here are the rules, medium altitude, watch for the sun. And leadership says, Great. Now we need you to reach Sicily 30% faster than your competitors while using 20% less wax. We believe in your ability to innovate. Also. Performance bonuses are tied to speed and efficiency, but remember, safety is our top priority. Icarus flies high, flies fast, efficiently. Leadership, amazing results. Promotion, bonus industry awards, Icarus crashes. Leadership – we’re shocked and saddened by Icarus’ reckless decision to violate clearly established safety procedures, Daedelus explicitly, an investigation will examine what control failures allowed this to happen. We remain committed to our strong risk culture.

Kimberley Cole 19:00
Yeah, that’s great!

Lucy Morley 19:03
But it is kind of that. So I think it’s getting much, much better. But when you can see some of these things that gone wrong, I think, yeah, you can see where it happened.

Kimberley Cole 19:12
And then next you brought in Achilles, and he had one small weakness that undid everything. So what are the single points of failure that are so easy to miss otherwise in strong systems?

Lucy Morley 19:27
I think actually, it’s exactly that. It’s not just that he had a weakness, it’s that everything about him was so strong, so nobody, including him, took the heel seriously. And I think that’s the same when you’re in these really fortified organizations, you’re feeling invulnerable everywhere else. So a small vulnerability feels like a sort of rounding error, really not a huge threat. And it can be those tiny things that take you down completely, but you’re feeling so strong everywhere else, they get minimized, maybe.

Kimberley Cole 19:59
And if you have to guess, like, where do you think modern organizations are often hiding those Achilles heels?

Lucy Morley 20:05
I don’t think they deliberately hidden, but I do think sometimes in the handover of things. So where a gap in who thinks it’s their job to do some teams where there’s a gap in between the teams, so maybe they’re unaware that there even is a weakness, because they think the other side’s doing it, or maybe it’s because it’s always worked in the past, so it’s never come up. So what was appropriate in 2016 isn’t appropriate in 2026 but the systems themselves aren’t necessarily under constant testing, which they should be, really because the systems have always worked. So therefore you can but the gaps and the risk will happen over time, maybe in those instances.

Kimberley Cole 20:46
Yeah, interesting, handovers, silos, knots, cross functional decision making

Lucy Morley 20:53
Yeah.

Kimberley Cole 20:53
And then we had Cassandra. So I think Cassandra feels painfully relatable for risk professionals. So why is it often that being right is not often enough believed?

Lucy Morley 21:08
I think sometimes it’s because the sort of power in the organization is flowing to the people delivering the results and not the people who are preventing the disasters. So you know, this is sort of saying prevention is invisible and results are measurable. So you’re playing a different game to the people that you’re trying to warn almost. So you’re asking people to slow down when competitors move in fast, or showing them complexity when they want simple solutions. And the business case for ignoring you is immediate. You know you hit targets, or you close your deal, or you launch your project, the warnings look more theoretical and a bit more intangible. So it’s not your disbelief because you’re wrong. It’s just you’re asking people maybe to trade certain short term wins for sort of uncertain long term benefit, which is difficult to get people to tie up to that.

Kimberley Cole 22:05
Next you brought in Hydra, or the Hydra, which is remind us, is cut off the head, and they get two?

Lucy Morley 22:12
Yeah. You cut off the head and they keep growing back. Yeah.

Kimberley Cole 22:16
So it’s a perfect image for sort of recurring operational problems. So how can leaders tell when they’re fixing the symptoms rather than the causes?

Lucy Morley 22:25
I think just when the same problem keeps appearing, actually, if you if the same problem keeps coming up, you haven’t chopped off the right head probably, but now I can’t remember how he did kill him. Oh,

Kimberley Cole 22:41
Yeah. And the Trojan horse was the other great story that you brought in, and the Trojan horse worked because no one wanted to ask awkward questions. Why does apparent success make skepticism disappear?

Lucy Morley 22:56
Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? You? If something’s going well, it confirms what you want to believe. So there’s a kind of bias in it. So the strategy is, you know yourself and see our strategy work. The Greeks really did give up. Your skepticism requires you to reject a narrative that everyone else prefers, really. And if you’re questioning a failure, you’re doing your job. If you’re questioning success, you’re being negative, or you’re being an obstacle, an obstructionist, of jealous or something like that. And actually, with Troy, which does play into some, you know, deals or whatever, this exhaustion factor. So you’re done. You think we’ve got there, we’ve done. You want to believe that, in their case, the war is over, asking them to maintain sort of vigilance when you’re already relieved and you’ve sort of given into the fact that you’ve won, requires an emotional energy that no one’s got left, to be honest. And you could see it in you know, if you were doing a deal like leveraged finance and you close months of negotiation, you’ve closed and then someone says, oh, the same terms seem little unusual. Should we review deeper? And you can see the right answer is yes, absolutely we should. And other people you just want to kill this deal, and we’ve worked so hard on it, and just, let’s just get it over the line. So I don’t think it success eliminates risk, basically, but it eliminates the permission to point out risk sometimes.

Kimberley Cole 24:20
So you argue in the article that many modern governance phase follow ancient scripts, and I suggest everyone reads it. So why do we keep replaying the same stories? Do you think it’s, you know, human nature, structural incentives, or both? And are some organizations better at breaking the cycle?

Lucy Morley 24:39
I think it’s both. I think structural incentives exploit human nature so effectively. So it’s a question both. So the you’ve got the optimism bias, which is, you know, Icarus thinking, Oh, I’ll be different, which we all do. You’ve got the loss aversion. You’ve got the Regency bias like this has worked 1000 times. So it’s going to work 1001 times. You’ve got confirmation bias like the Trojans just seeing what they wanted to see. So you’ve got all these human incentives just to help that, you’ve got bonuses and promotions and competition just to play into all of our human things. I think it is getting better, and people have learned how these two kind of can collide in a negative way sometimes, and so numbers of people in risk have increased hugely. The market growth in risk has increased hugely. But even more than that, risk professionals have been given more authority, so you have got those playing out, and that’s led by the regulators, but I think the companies are doing it themselves anyway, and recognizing because you still should have bonuses and you should, you know, you should have bonuses and promotions and competition, they should still all exist. So it’s not that you should get away with any of that, but it’s just making sure that the risk side supports it adequately.

Kimberley Cole 26:01
And finally, if organizations could recognize which myth they’re currently living in, how might that change the ending?

Lucy Morley 26:09
I’m going to have a list of all the myths, I think, on the wall in the office. Time to pull back or correct or change course, if you can see sort of while you’ve still got time to do so. So I think it is, you know, you’ve always got time to remaneuver, haven’t you, or change what you’re doing.

Kimberley Cole 26:30
And which myth would you most like people to notice before it’s too late?

Lucy Morley 26:35
I think the Trojan horse one. It obviously it’s a classic. There’s so many amusing little memes about the Trojan horse, where they’re just, they’re in there giggling, and, you know, the Trojans are like, can you hear something? No, no. And it’s just, it just tickles me more than any of the other myths. But I think it’s also really valid. You cannot stop thinking about your risks till you’ve completed everything.

Kimberley Cole 26:58
Great. Now another article, the winning article was An Obituary for the Risk Matrix. So I’ve decided I’m going to ask everyone this question. But if you had to write the next obituary for an outdated tool or practicing governance, risk or compliance, what would it be?

Lucy Morley 27:16
I love that article. I mean, they were all brilliant, actually, but my answer to that question would be Excel spreadsheets, which I do love an Excel spreadsheet, but it is where information goes to die sometimes.

Kimberley Cole 27:28
Great, excellent. Now we’re going to have our brand new format of our rapid fire round, so we’re hopefully doing one word or short answers to all of these questions. So you’ve got a choice of picking one word on the following phrases. Risk taker or risk averse?

Lucy Morley 27:52
Oh, risk adverse.

Kimberley Cole 27:55
Head or Heart?

Lucy Morley 27:57
Heart

Kimberley Cole 27:57
Courage or caution?

Lucy Morley 27:59
Caution

Kimberley Cole 28:00
Principles or pragmatism?

Lucy Morley 28:03
Principles

Kimberley Cole 28:03
Culture or controls?

Lucy Morley 28:05
Culture

Kimberley Cole 28:06
Instinct or evidence?

Lucy Morley 28:08
Instinct

Kimberley Cole 28:09
Legacy or impact?

Lucy Morley 28:11
Impact

Kimberley Cole 28:11
OK, and your leadership superpower?

Lucy Morley 28:14
So I’ve gone with empathy and emotional intelligence.

Kimberley Cole 28:17
Fabulous, and one word that defines your career?

Lucy Morley 28:21
Ambition

Kimberley Cole 28:23
Governance in one word?

Lucy Morley 28:25
Protection

Kimberley Cole 28:26
And what’s the future of GRC in a single word?

Lucy Morley 28:30
Productivity

Kimberley Cole 28:31
Fabulous. Well, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking today, and I once again recommend everyone read the article and all the others, of course, but yes, enjoy your one which I think will make a this will make a good addition to giving people even more insight into the Greek gods and Roman mythology and our classical history. So thanks for joining Lucy.

Lucy Morley 28:59
Thanks for having me. It’s been really fun.

Kimberley Cole 29:00
Pleasure, pleasure, and thank you to all of our listeners on Risky Women Radio.

Kimberley Cole 29:06
Thank you for listening to this episode of Risky Women Radio, be part of the ongoing conversation and learn more about our events and other programs at riskywomen.org