AMP Limited has appointed Anne-Marie Paterson as its Group Whistleblowing Officer as it invests $100 million (pre tax) over two years above usual investment to further strengthen its risk, governance and controls.

Ms Paterson is a senior legal practitioner who has joined AMP from CBA where she was the Executive Manager and Whistleblower Investigation Officer.

Ms Paterson is responsible for leading whistleblower awareness, training and investigations across the business.

The appointment of Ms Paterson as the Group Whistleblowing Officer is the latest initiative to improve risk management and governance across AMP.

AMP Chief Risk Officer Jenny Fagg said: 

“Risk has been placed at the core of AMP’s culture and further enhancing risk management, governance and compliance continues to be a key initiative under AMP’s new strategy. We have appointed Anne-Marie Paterson as our Group Whistleblowing Officer in recognition of how seriously we take whistleblowing and to help people feel comfortable speaking up.

“We have also made significant progress to overhaul our governance and organisational structures to create better independence and oversight of issues. Our activity has focused on improving policies, processes and systems and increasing the use of technology to create efficiencies.”

AMP has delivered several major initiatives to improve risk management including:

• A new risk system that captures incident, issue and breach information more effectively, efficiently and consistently.
• New risk processes to manage interactions with regulators and provide more comprehensive regulatory reporting to management and the board.
• Upgrading processes and technologies to improve our ability to identify and prevent financial crime.
• Increasing capacity and the visibility of risk in all roles across AMP to effect cultural change.
• Stronger board governance including common membership between the AMP Limited and AMP Bank boards and now both the remuneration and risk committees consist of all non-executive directors. The audit committee is also now comprised of all non-executive directors other than AMP Chairman David Murray.

Ms Fagg said: “We are delivering on our mandate to improve the way we manage risk across AMP. Our stakeholders, including our customers, expect us to manage our risk effectively and the commercial return on doing so is profound.”