Intelligent Business Webinar | S-RM

[Music] welcome to this intelligent business webinar hosted by srm my name is marcus gordon and i'm a senior associate in srm strategic intelligence practice just as an introduction for those of you who may not be familiar with srm we're a global risk and intelligence consultancy and we support our clients across a wide range of corporate intelligence services and and cyber security there's a bit of background to this discussion alongside my colleagues joining me today i had the pleasure of working on srm's recently published intelligent business 2022 strategic intelligence report you can freely download the reports on our website in the report we surveyed more than 200 users and consumers of strategic intelligence across a range of u.s and uk firms with revenues of more than 250 million usd and we asked them about how they view the discipline what matters most to them when it comes to strategic intelligence outputs and what changes they're seeing in the field the report also drew on insights from intelligence specialists working in three major global companies namely cheryl steele who's a cso at starbucks gary petraeus the vice president for global security and resilience at levi strauss and jerry crawl the chief risk ethics and compliance officer at brown forum corporation um we're going to touch on some of the key findings and insights from this research through the webinar and i'd also like to say that that we encourage audience members to submit questions by the q a function at the top of your screens and please also make a note if if you'd like to hear from a particular panelist otherwise just just send the questions as they are and we can um address them as a collective we'll make sure to leave time at the end for your questions and comments so so please do make use of this option joining me today are three of my colleagues from srm first we have martin devenish martin is a board director and the head of corporate intelligence at srm prior to joining the company martin spent 22 years at goldman sachs in london and new york and during his career martin assumed a number of leadership roles and became a partner in 2002. from 2005 to 2011 he was head of equities for central and eastern europe middle east and africa and for the following two years as an advisory director to goldman sachs with a focus on growth and frontier markets in that region martin uh welcome marcus thank you good good morning good afternoon good evening to everybody and thanks for joining we also have sam taylor sam is the head of corporate intelligence for the americas uh sam has led and managed complex internal and external investigations as well as supported clients in contentious litigation across several fields including money laundering counterfeit goods intellectual property fraud international asset traces employee misconduct and bribery issues he co-led several monitorships in the public and private sectors and has significant experience in defending clients subject to hostile takeovers or proxy fights he also supports clients with due diligence on large cross-border transactions sam began his career in finance before joining crow where he ultimately led the firm's north american research practice hi sam hey marcus great to be with you um and last but not least we've got gabrielle reed gabby has over 10 years in the industry and has worked closely with our clients to develop tailored solutions that map their precise requirements for intelligence and analysis based on the locations exposure and objectives um analyzing changing geopolitical security and regulatory landscapes to better inform decision making prior to joining srm she worked for a travel risk advisory firm and assisted in the planning and coordination of non-medical evacuations gabby is also an enterprise risk management certified professional hi gabby thanks marcus it's great to be here in this webinar i'm hoping we'll be able to draw out three key themes that we developed in our report first answering the question about the value that strategic intelligence brings second we'll look at what differentiates good from bad intelligence and last we'll discuss what advantages organizations can gain by working with their intelligence providers whether whether those are internal or external as partners rather than just service providers so let's start today's conversation with with a central question what do we actually mean when we when we speak about strategic intelligence um in the the 2022 strategic intelligence report which i mentioned we refer to it as the timely relevant accurate and actionable insights an organization uses to identify respond to or even anticipate external risks and opportunities pertinent to their sector and jurisdictions now that's quite a broad definition but it's purposely so and i think crucially it speaks to the idea of not only anticipating and responding to risks but also to identifying opportunities martin um i'd like to open by asking you about whether you've perceived in your conversations with clients for example a shift in in how intelligence is seen not so much as a function that serves to put on the brakes to avoid risky situations but but actually as a business enabler um yeah sure thanks marcus and and again hello everybody and and thank you for joining i i think he's probably worth clarifying uh up front that that what we're not talking about here is an entirely new field of intelligence in fact in fact what we are seeing is is many of the skills that that in the past would perhaps have sat in a in a traditional security risk team now being deployed more broadly there's an increasing recognition that that the skill sets that that have sat in those teams so things like triangulation of information scenario planning and and consequence planning around those scenarios how those can benefit the broader uh corporate organization that recognition of those skills has also had another big driver which is which is the explosion in information um that's available online and data that's available online now the sheer scale of that data um can itself be a challenge but but if you're able to disseminate and make sense of that and and crucially the information that's most relevant to you and do that at speed then you're going to find yourself with a higher degree of preparedness and potentially um add an advantage to some of your competitors um open source intelligence or osint as i'm sure everyone on this this call uh knows it as the acronym and the growth in in available data has in my opinion been the major driver to the commercialization of what traditionally was that intelligence function that's that in in the security risk team so back to your question um and around whether that business intelligence or whether intelligence has been a business enabler or a business blocker i i would argue that for the more enlightened organizations it's always been viewed as an enabler you know the goal of intelligence is to help the company understand and and if i were to put my old banker hat on price risk um as accurately as it can that process of course could result in a decision not to proceed with the transaction or you know to your point um be viewed as a block to a partnership or an investment or a higher um but the point there is there's a reason for that you know the the process has determined that the price of that risk outweighs the potential return um from from that investment um but you know it's blocked for a reason um now again you know it i would argue that actually being a business enabler sometimes is staying out of trouble and so those decisions not to proceed with something if you believe that you've you've done your work and you've priced that appropriately is just as much a business enabled and finding those new opportunities but you can of course play the polar opposite to that you know if if through that strategic intelligence you find that that you believe you are able to price risk to assess the risk more appropriately that has the potential to open up opportunities to use a business that others who haven't been through the process that you've been through may be too conservative they may have mispriced that risk and so in those scenarios it's absolutely the case that you know good business intelligence is is is absolutely becoming a fundamental building block in the whole area of business planning um of course you know ocean is deployed every day um and it's not just in in those strategic decisions many many people on this webinar will will have seen the shift in in the corporate intelligence business you know an industry that we sit in from one that traditionally relied on uh heavily relied on networks and human source and getting on the ground and having those conversations and of course i'm not here saying that human to doesn't have its value absolutely does have its value but um the speed with which industry moves the speed with which information travels um has only accentuated the importance of timeliness so yes relevance but also timeless timeliness is a big part of relevance um and that has grown that importance has grown significantly you know we've all seen reputations be damaged in super quick time and if you're not ahead an event or a story you are you are at risk of such damage alongside that is a requirement for ongoing monitoring you know there's the initial work that you do but then situations don't remain static forever and of course when you get into the world of monitoring you need to make that as real-time as you possibly can um you know maybe to give an example um you know we work with there's a a a large global tech company that that we work with and support in a number of areas for them but in particular in right now in in latin america and we provide them with monthly briefs which are looking at medium long term um shifts in sentiment and in particular in regulation um uh uh around areas that are impacting them so you know they're a tech company um so areas around things like fake news and monitoring situations around fake news now we're doing that in latin america as many on here will know there's already been a number of elections in latin america already this year and there's one or two pretty significant ones to come and so that monitoring is yes you know what's the direction of travel here but also what's happening in the right here and now because you know that as we know um fake news around elections can be a pretty powerful weapon um and so you know that's an example of how we work uh with our clients right now yeah what the with the latin american example that you you mentioned there martin as well as in in some of our other engagements what we've heard from clients is that this adds real value whether they have an existing internal intelligence function themselves or not um with all the information that's out there it really is about getting to that specificity and sorting through all the available information and and drawing out the meaning for for their particular operations um we're going to look at this a little bit later on but but for me that's really getting at the crux of private sector intelligence and it's an interesting point you made there martin about intelligence plugging into a variety of organizational requirements this was something that we that was born out in in the survey findings in our report where there was a fairly even split in terms of whether intelligence served more to support strategic or or more to support operational decisions now particularly senior leadership saw this as equally important for both which which was quite um quite an interesting finding to see the idea that intelligence can assist at all levels and for a variety of decisions i think shows um why it makes sense to adopt quite a broad definition for what strategic intelligence is um staying with the definition uses of of strategic intelligence for a moment gabby if i could bring you in here um to consider this uh in slightly more practical terms if we if we look at a situation like the um the breakout of the war in ukraine how do you see from a real world point of view that the notion of actionable insights that that we include in our understanding of of the concept um thank you marcus um i think the reference to actionable insights really speaks to the importance of forward-looking analysis so to martin's point earlier one of the advantages in using strategic intelligence is that it allows for planning and this is what we saw with engagements with our clients in the weeks prior to russia's invasion of ukraine so rather than getting caught up in prediction or the will he won't he invade debate our clients saw more value in understanding what the situation could look like and more importantly what they would need to consider both at a strategic and also at an operational level to best prepare for that situation and often this sort of scenario mapping is really useful in identifying a business's blind spots or for identifying flag posts along a particular trajectory that are of course business relevant and are useful in tracking the important but often more subtle changes in an external environment and so thinking about those those first weeks you know back in january and february this year and one particular client engagement that comes to mind we actually worked to develop a very structured and methodology-based approach to digest the you know quite frankly streams of information that was coming out from both ukraine and russia watches at the time and the aim of this approach was to be proactive and not simply focus on incident monitoring so rather what we look to do is establish what we would frame a regular intelligence report that allowed for the identification and monitoring of slightly longer trends and then of course shifts within these trends and this allowed us to read whether or not the move the the needle was moving and of course what we could anticipate the impact of that move to be so we developed early warning triggers that would inform our client of any escalation intentions between ukraine and russia and specifically we assess these triggers in terms of consequences that were relevant to them so safety to personnel cyber considerations as well as sanction risks and our ongoing analysis in those early weeks of these triggers then fed directly into our clients crisis management posture and allowed them to develop the appropriate responses so for example staff evacuations to any notable deteriorations in the operating environment and since then i think you know now post the actual invasion we've since developed a range of monitoring products that are designed to read the temperature on any associated geopolitical shifts across the globe and this could be anything from developments uh quite close to the to the actual conflict so what's happening with with the baltic states for example to you know looking at the bigger picture and tracking emerging drivers of social unrest for example that are starting to emerge from the disruption to global wheat supplies so what we're really looking to do is help our clients look over the horizon and identify the next possible hot spot for them yeah i think that's a that's a key aspect of intelligence that you raise there gaby in terms of of being able to keep an eye on changes in the external environment or those shifts and trends and the examples that you you just discussed show i think how one of the key functions that we aim for is as intelligence practitioners uh relates again to the difference between information and sometimes information overload in in in the example that you discussed and intelligence and that and that leads quite nicely to the next theme that we're we're covering in the webinar and that's of good versus bad intelligence um one of the things that we started seeing very early on in the pandemic uh was an evolution in our intelligence outputs driven very much by the types of questions that our clients were asking um i think it was understandable given the uncertainties that were surrounding so many aspects of glo of covert 19 globally that early on in the pandemic a lot of client questions and therefore intelligence outputs were reactive looking at constantly changing factors like like case numbers uh changing travel advisories restrictions of movement and so on um at the practitioner level gabby did you did you see that approach change well i mean reactive reporting can have value but it's difficult to track a lot of these variables in a timely fashion and this can often lead to analysis that's quite simply just a step behind so i remember those early days you know no sooner had we reported on the latest travel advisories then those advisories had changed and so the value of our intelligence was was lower real-time reporting is important but it's not necessarily what i would frame to be the primary purpose of strategic intelligence we're trying to achieve something slightly different here strategic intelligence really aims to support intelligence-driven decision-making and almost by definition if you think about that it would require forward-looking and a sort of a broader perspective so some of the key issues that you know if we look protect us back to the report respondents to our survey noted is when looking at the intelligence they receive more often than not it takes too much time to digest or it's not tailored to their specific business needs and that it's simply too much information to make useful sense of it and cheryl steele that csi from starbucks who as you mentioned marcus kindly gave srm an in-depth interview for the report really said it best and i'm going to paraphrase slightly but for this type of intelligence and obviously there's multiple types of intelligence out there but for this type of intelligence support to be of greatest value to a client or company it needs to be aligned to the business of the business and this really means it can be a business enabler even or i'd go as far as saying especially during these uncertain times so taking it back to the pandemic as the covert 19 pandemic progressed we really saw an evolution in the types of concerns or questions that our clients had and consequently we had to see an evolution in the types of intelligence support that they required so increasingly we moved away from a type of reactive reporting we had to zoom out look at that bigger picture and importantly by focusing on what this all meant for each client and recognizing the differences within that we began to look at the strategic level implications of the pandemic and this really was was quite wide-ranging um for example at one point we looked at you know vaccination development and the planned roll-outs not only looking at the approach to vaccine dissemination in our clients key markets or tracking the latest advisories that were being released by international bodies at the time but interlinking this with political security operational considerations so that we could really assess the realities of vaccine dissemination across different jurisdictions and i think we also looked at at the time at vaccine mandates and related labor pressure points along supply chains looking at the impacts of sectoral labor availability could we anticipate where vaccine hesitancy could manifest and possibly impact labor supply as well as sort of wider supply chain disruptions too so i think with those examples you can start to see that we moved away from your high level reactive or tier one analysis so you know looking at the question how do i respond to the pandemic today and we moved into tier 2 tier 3 considerations and i said this later to develop some very creative outputs for clients who you know already in those early stages we're starting to look through the pandemic and even to the post-pandemic context but what i would add is that it need not be only in response to a major geopolitical shift in the landscape such as covert 19 or even you know referencing the the current conflict in ukraine or the ramifications for global oil prices and commodity supplies we've seen the value in forward-looking and more strategic level intelligence on a range of perhaps slower moving shifts so for example esg concerns such as regulations in single-use plastics for example or the variance in a government's approach to forest risk commodities and the reputational consequences that can come out of that but yeah of course the pandemic was a major accelerator in businesses thinking about strategic implications of geopolitical developments gabby i think you raised some really interesting points particularly in regard to understanding the business of the business what the covet 19 pandemic i think has shown us was that different types of intelligence can be good at different times and to address different types of questions in line with our clients needs and evolving objectives you'll see in our report that responses to our survey showed that what intelligence consumers value the most are the relevance accuracy and timeliness of intelligence you won't always be able to satisfy these three needs of your client unless you actually know that client very well so the first step is of course to always listen to your client and to spend the time to understand the operational needs that they have and the risks that their business faces the better you know your client of course the better you'll be at understanding and answering their questions and anticipating their future needs which is i think critical to to and key and central to uh strategic intelligence the most relevant intelligence is of course tailored and as a function of those needs as you'll see in our report respondents to our survey stated that the most preferred way they'd like to receive strategic intelligence is in a tailored report with customized analysis and you won't be surprised to find that one of the biggest complaints survey respondents had with intelligence reporting is that it isn't relevant to the needs of their business this was particularly evident during the height of the pandemic as the nature of the coven 19 pandemic changed and as our clients were adjusting to their postures in regard to changing government mandates as well as the needs and desires of their employees their supply chain issues changes in customer demand we predicted and observed that their intelligence needs would also change and specifically that intelligence needed to be relevant to each particular business whether they be supply chain reliant or human capital intensive businesses this often meant looking at workforce and employee issues to gaby's point our work is so much better informed and our clients better served when we understand the business of the business now of course this required us to be proactive in identifying trends making a calculated and thorough analysis and relaying that information to our clients in a timely manner in some cases it affirmed what clients themselves were predicting but in others we contradicted their own findings and we found in that latter situation was where we were able to provide the most value it's not always a message that clients want to hear but our role as intelligent professionals is to go where the facts tell us within the context of our clients business finally i think the format in which that intelligence is reported to our clients is equally critical they want reporting that's proactive timely and relevant to their organizational needs but it needs to be in an easily consumable form that means that the intelligence and analysis needs to cut through the noise and get straight to the point clients aren't looking for a peer-reviewed study but a concise and well-informed brief by someone knowledgeable about the field who can quickly get to the point about what the intelligence identified means for that client's business so that it's actionable this should be in the form of a detailed and concise report with all the kind of extraneous bits removed and i'd also say you know a verbal briefing doesn't hurt either if the value is to be delivered if the the message to be delivered is urgent then i think that's probably the best way to get in front of the right intelligence consumer quickly i think professionals in our field are often partial to demonstrating their knowledge and their analysis of the facts which of course is critical but i think keeping in mind the client their business and the time that they have to digest the end product is equally if not more important thanks sam um i thought it was quite interesting that you both spoke about um different types of intelligence being good at different times in the pandemic whether that's more incident driven or more forward-looking but but either way look at it and whatever the particular output is that that we might deliver um to clients at a given time it's it's quite apparent that the demand for for private sector intelligence is there and and it seems like that demand is only going to grow something that our survey results showed um quite overwhelmingly was that the the many different forms of intelligence are are increasingly valued 80 of our respondents said that their firms needed to to actually invest more in these types of services and and 88 said that strategic intelligence is an important factor in the overall success of the company um at the same time as you'll see on the slide there only 20 of respondents said they exclusively or predominantly rely on internal sources for intelligence and there are a number of reasons for that but to me that speaks to the real value that organizations can draw from developing a close relationship with their with their intelligence providers and it also puts an expectation um on on those intelligence providers then to make sure that that they really do understand the client and um i think that brings us quite nicely to you to the third area that that we're gonna we're gonna speak about today and that's um related to the value of partnerships sporadic engagements with intelligence providers can be perfectly appropriate um at times of course but the downside is that they can lead to that reactive support or reactive intelligence outputs that you referenced earlier gabby rather than building um what you might think about as a longer term strategic outlook martin i wonder if you would be happy to to speak here about what you see are some of the key advantages of of adopting what we refer to as a partnership model with your intelligence provider um yeah sure i mean i think i think it as you say marcus you know there are there are clearly going to be many areas where the traditional client vendor relationship is perfectly fine you know be it um a simple one-off task or or where perhaps for confidentiality reasons um you know there's only so much that a vendor can know um but when it comes to you know something that gabby's mentioned we've talked a little bit about already when it comes to horizon scanning or as i think one of our contributors said in the report trying to look around the corner um you know relevance relevance is super important in any horizon scanning there's going to be more variables involved um you know there's going to be more potential threats than actual threats um and it's those to quote a famous quote it's those unknown unknowns that you're trying to spot as soon as they start to develop to be able to identify those and importantly those whose consequences have have the potential to have a pretty significant impact on your client you or us i should say um as the vendor really need to have an appreciation of what the business drivers are for that client's business um and you know not only the business drivers but what are the sensitivities and which ones are going to have the biggest impact because there's often a scale for that in terms of where you need to look first and what you need to address now that appreciation is only going to come from as a as transparent a relationship and as transparent a dialogue as you can um you know to be fair here the onus is on the client um if they wish to have that relationship to them to open up we can't we can't force the client to open up and so it's really their responsibility if they genuinely want to get proper benefit from that uh forward look intelligence the onus is on them to develop a a relationship with with the vendor to the point where they feel trusting enough to to share some of those key core components of of what drives um the business you know and if they don't they got to recognize as a trade-off um and and it does become more reactionary rather than forward look and as we said you know there's some value in that they want to dismiss that completely but but it it prevents you from getting into that sort of strategy side and that business planning um and and you know it's an obvious thing to say um but the best relationships that we have with our clients are built on trust um that takes time but without that you know you're never gonna get to that transparent dialogue i think it's also um it's also worth pointing out for those people who have dialed in here who are you know would be our points of contact within companies you've got to have that relationship first before we can have that relationship and so i think within companies you know where it works best for us and in turn with the in-house strategic intelligence team is when that team is very close to the core decision makers and so you know the first buy-in to some extent it needs to be at the the recognition of these skills and the talent and and the insight that sits within these teams by the decision makers the core decision makers the c-suite and whoever else is involved within the corporates because without that there's not a lot we can do um but it really is about you know trying to identify the needs trying to anticipate the needs to be attuned to the businesses objectives and and where we can to be attuned to their risk appetite now you know at the end of the day the risk decision still ends still lives with the end client but our job is to make them as informed as possible and where we can give advice on some of the scenarios and the impact likely but ultimately it's their decision but if we can be you know in touch with where their risk tolerance sits on different aspects then again that allows us to do our job um much more effectively and it also helps us understand what are the real questions that need answering and all of this comes back to this relevance and and and timeliness you know if you know what the right questions are what you're going to dig up and what you're going to provide is likely to be more relevant and you're also going to not waste a lot of time looking at stuff which ultimately is irrelevant to that client you're talking to yeah i think it's a it's a really important point to raise at martin about the owners being on the client to let their intelligence provider in if that partnership model is is really going to bear fruit and i suppose it also speaks to the recognition of intelligence providers as delivering an important service something i alluded to with reference to to the survey results earlier um what i think we've seen in our work is is is that the willingness to engage in this way does vary it varies client to client of course um but also uh perhaps a little bit market market um sam you're based in the us where um some might argue there's there's a slightly more developed market in terms of private sector intelligence have you seen in in clients engagement engagements that this notion of um partnership is becoming entrenched in how businesses approach intelligence providers it's a good question marcus i think the answer is uh it's mixed and i think some of this goes back to to martin's point about the balance between the vendor and the client and on each hi each side understanding each other it's on us the onus is on us as the vendor and the intelligence professional to be able to explain to the client what services we can provide and what we can do but it's also on the client to recognize what that is and to be able to exploit it beyond whatever their core competency is so you'll see in our intelligent business report brown foreman's jerry crawl notes that strategic intelligence is not a part of his company's core competence it's not what they do as a company and this is why they seek external support but because intelligence is about finding those issues that impact their business jerry wants to know that the intelligence he receives is put into the right context and immediately actionable for this to work a partner that understands the business understands the business is is vital the lack of internal expertise was listed by respondents in our survey as the top reason why they rely on external sources for their intelligence needs and this was followed closely by the need for higher quality analysis than you know a client can produce internally of course in addition to that they wanted they desired an independent perspective and that's i think as well where we can come in and supplement whatever internal intelligence team does so all these points speak to the notion of having a trusted partner in the intelligence space someone who you can send bespoke requests and questions to and whom you can task with certain projects and you know as back to i think our earlier point in this webinar who someone who knows your business and will deliver to you that customized and relevant reporting that we touched on earlier i'd also note that some of our clients you know just to what i was saying earlier have a mix in terms of a range of their complexity so some have very mature internal intelligence in organizations while others are are still building being built out and our clients will leverage us for specific and targeted assignments those with the minimal internal intelligence programs rely on us quite heavily whereas those that are more complex are going to be more on those bespoke targeted tasks and the immature programs you know in those instances we'll often be in fact you know filling analyst positions for them serving as a supplemental aspect to their internal team so i think in either instance it's a partnership given how closely you need to understand the client's environment and to be able to provide actionable intelligence but some of these partnerships are going to be more entrenched than others yeah i would i'd agree with sam on that i think you know we can add that value in terms of expertise capacity and independence um but where we've seen the most success in providing valuable insights to our clients has been we where we worked in an integrated manner you know intelligence just cannot exist in a silo and it needs to be digestible and it needs to be useful for our clients so we've had the most successful outcomes when we've been able to have almost an ongoing conversation with our clients and i suppose taking it back to you know internal intelligence teams this would be a dialogue with their internal stakeholders or their internal clients so to speak so our intelligence outputs need to be useful to and align with their objectives those stakeholders objectives be it to paint a picture of the risks or indeed highlight possible opportunities which martin touched on at the start and unfortunately at times this can mean going back to the drawing board when at that conceptualization phase to really make sure that you know the output that we're designing is of use to that client yeah thanks gabby um and thanks sam i'm aware that we've all been speaking for for a very long time now so at this point um i would like to open the conversation up and take some of the questions that that you have been posting on on the q a function um i'll keep an eye on that so if you haven't done so and would like to please do post your questions there we've had a few come in already so i'll start with those um so the first question here is to what extent can technology assist or even replace human intelligence analysis um gabby should i send that your way sure well hopefully it never uh if it completely replaces it otherwise we'd all be out of a job um but no i think in all seriousness technology is an enabler right it can help us expand our information sources it can build in efficiencies into our collection and processing of information and it can improve our analysis and evolve the way we convey or share our intelligence findings so it really does have an important role to play in this space um as it stands though from from our perspective i'd say you know there is still a huge value in the human factor particularly when looking at tailored and relevant intelligence outputs you know the themes that have been peppered through the conversation today as we've referenced you know the ability to have that conversation between the intelligence producer and the intelligence consumer is vital you know it needs evolve priorities change and i'm not convinced that technology in the sector as yet is at the level where it's going to you know respond to that without human input we can definitely we definitely should be using technology to do our jobs better what the role of technology will look like you know further along the line is still to be seen um if i was a betting person um i'd say though that there's going to be a balance of some sort particular um providers will do certain things well because of technology and certain providers will do other things well because of their human aspect and ultimately what that means for the consumer hopefully is that will be the best of both worlds hey thanks we've got a another question here the the speakers mentioned helping clients look over the horizon and identifying or considering the next possible hot spot disrupter or opportunity are there any developments or trends in particular that you are currently watching very closely um martin you wanna have a go with that i'll give it a go yeah um i mean i think the short answer there's a lot uh and you know and and again you know with not one wishing to be too generic because the whole point of this obviously is not everything's relevant to every one of our clients but i but i you know i mean i think we just take a few lessons i mean i do think partly following on from gabby's point i think if anything you know what we've all learned over the last six months maybe a little bit longer to be fair um very pandemic or during the pandemic as well you know there was a book that was written a good few years ago called the world is flat by a guy called thomas friedman um who's a author writer us and it was essentially saying you know effectively you know you wake up one day and actually you know you can have you can have businesses in india even though you're you know ultimately selling in the states or course whatever and and doing business everywhere looks a lot like doing business down the road well i think we've all learned that that's not true um and you know we've learned it's not true you know partly because of the challenges of the supply chain during the pandemic but i also think i also think you know the trend of globalization dismissed too easily and too readily cultural differences um and i think they're coming back to the fore and so i do think maybe we're talking our own book here but i do think there's a there's a resurgence in the intelligence industry and you know you can look at it as the trade you know some of it will be that traditional geo-political sort of research because the differences are bigger than we thought um and and that lesson's been learned very harshly over the last two to three years so so i think generally the backdrop is there's a lot more horizon scanning i mean if we were going to look specifically and if i was going to take a guess i think you know obviously you've got you've got the tragedy that is that is the war in in ukraine you've got ongoing lockdowns in china um as as you know which is a different strategy to to um to the pandemic that were coming out of the pandemic that a number of countries have had but all of that is accentuating the supply chain so you know do i believe everyone's supply chain is going to come back to be down go being down the road no i don't i think there are other dynamics that will prevent that but there's obviously a shift in supply chain and there's a greater awareness of things that can impact your ability to get your widgets to the production line wherever that is um and so there's much more scrutiny on that actually the one thing i think that is also coming back um it's going to be interesting to watch and gabby touched on this with regards to wheat um i think social unrest unfortunately um is something that corporates are gonna have to pay a lot more attention to i mean you know obviously um you know there's the extreme sort of disruption of unrest which is the war but if you look at what's happening fuel prices global inflation food um and you know we've got an example right here right now in sri lanka um you know you think back a little while you know four five six seven eight nine years ago you know would we have thought this was going on in sri lanka there's a bunch of companies that you know that have exposure there and so so i think we're going to start to see that pocket of social unrest and different countries become more and more prevalent so monitoring that sentiment social media that sort of stuff is one and then and then the other thing which won't get into here because it's a pretty big topic but the yes is part of it i mean clearly there are you know esg is something now that that people need to pay a lot more to and rightly are paying a lot more attention to we're doing a lot of work gaby mentioned the example of single-use plastics earlier you know we're doing a lot of work on on on the eds and the ge but as i say i think that s is important because i think the ramifications of of social disruption can be pretty significant as we're seeing right now and i just you know come in there to to add to that i think something that will be critical to understand is the interlinkage between these geopolitical pressures and pre-existing domestic factors in a particular jurisdiction you know martin referenced sri lanka there that's a combination of both there were inherent domestic factors that were present there are geopolitical pressures that are playing out and we're seeing the consequences of that it's going to become increasingly important to weigh up how geopolitical regional and domestic pressures play out in different markets because we don't want to be in a position where you know geopolitical drivers results in anticipating these types of manifestations equally in every market we need to understand the specifics of each market to or each jurisdiction so something that will be increasingly critical for businesses to understand is how do geopolitical factors impact the domestic factors how do the pre-existing domestic factors respond to those geopolitical pressures and what are the manifestations of that in that particular country i think that'll be really interesting and really relevant for businesses particularly those who have a quite a widespread global footprint as well yeah i think we've got one more question come in um you mentioned forward-looking of a broader perspective but tailored to specific business needs does this include commodities and do you have specialists in the pgms for example and if so what type of reports can you prepare for the client um any takers on that um i i don't think we have specialists in pgms which i assume is platinum group metals um but you know in terms of do we have experience and do we work with commodities companies i mean you know metals mining companies yes sort of gas companies yes um do we does that involve looking at some of the provenance of those metals looking at the global industry in terms of um you know particularly when you look at some of these metals you when you look at you know the regulation around um trade controls you know or you know i mean there's a whole lithium war going on i use that so i'm advisedly i mean at the moment you know and so there's a there's a lot of uh pressure on certain countries and um industries in terms of the degree to which they export or not export and i think you know with the um headlong rush to um zero carbon and evs and all that sort of stuff i can see the pressure on those only going one way and so again in terms of you know in terms of an explicit answer to the question do we have pgm experts no do we have experience of looking at how regulation how trade tensions how social issues can impact the availability the supply the demand the control thereof of that trade yeah absolutely so um it's a and you know i'm monitoring the looks of all of that stuff um and so you know it's a question of deploying stuff i referred to earlier taking those open source intelligence skills and just pointing it at another asset or another industry and seeing what you can find out and to gabby's point you know a lot of this a lot of projects are bespoke in nature so it's an iterative process with the client so the client like this will come you know whoever asked the question thank you for the question will come to us and say right this is this is this is what i'm trying to answer how would you help and then it will be okay this is what we think we could do this is what's available this is how we monitor it this is the english and then it's that back and forth and that gets to the to the very point about you know what doesn't work is that generic you know give me an industry study on pgms tell me which of the producers in which jurisdictions do i are really going to impact that market um and you know potential supply disruption what have you so so no to specialists but yes i'm sure we can help okay thanks very much um we haven't had any more questions come in so um i think we can wrap this up a little bit early um i'd like to extend a warm thank you to all the panelists for their time and insights and also to the audience for for their questions um if you'd like to get in touch with any of us at srm please do reach out um i'd also like to remind you that our 2022 strategic intelligence report is available to download for free on the srm website srminform.com thank you very much and thank you to the panelists

2022-07-23 12:04

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