CPD EP19 – Risk Transformation, AI & Cultural Change with Samantha Regan

🎙️ RiskMasters Episode 19 — featuring Samantha Regan, Managing Director at Accenture.

In this CPD-accredited episode of RiskMasters, host Julien Haye is joined by Samantha Regan, Managing Director and Risk Transformation Lead at Accenture. With over 20 years of leadership across financial services, regulatory strategy, and business transformation, Samantha brings a sharp and deeply practical lens to how organisations evolve their risk and compliance functions.

From reimagining control environments to integrating Generative AI and fostering a risk-aware culture, this episode explores how risk can drive performance, not just protect against failure. Samantha shares powerful reflections from both consultancy and industry roles, highlighting the importance of purpose-led leadership, workforce reskilling, and end-to-end transformation planning.

You’ll hear actionable ideas for building risk functions that are future-ready, digitally enabled, and culturally grounded as well as insights into the mindset shifts required at board level.

“We’re moving away from box-ticking. The opportunity now is to rewire risk and compliance as value drivers, not overheads.” – Samantha Regan

If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to follow, review, and share RiskMasters. Your support helps us bring more strategic conversations to the risk and transformation community.

In this edition of RiskMasters, you will learn:

🔹 What Risk Transformation Really Means: Why success isn’t just about frameworks, but clarity of purpose, culture, and outcome-oriented design.

🔹 AI in Risk & Compliance: How Generative AI can lift administrative burdens and unlock human capacity with safeguards to preserve integrity.

🔹 Culture as a Catalyst: Why the right mindset, trust, and behavioural expectations are the hardest and most essential parts of transformation.

🔹 Building the Future-Ready Risk Function: From skills to operating models, how to shift from reactive compliance to agile, insight-driven decision-making.

🔹 Risk Leadership & Talent: Why future leaders must become “risk athletes” blending curiosity, critical thinking, and strategic fluency.

🎧 Listen now on:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• Or your preferred podcast platform

📌 More about Samantha Regan

Samantha Regan is Managing Director and Risk Transformation Lead at Accenture, where she advises global financial services clients on regulatory change, AI adoption, and compliance operating models. A former risk leader at Barclays, Samantha brings a practitioner’s lens to cultural change, leadership, and transformation at scale.

👉 Connect with Samantha on LinkedIn

📝 Related Resources:

• ⁠What Would Change if Risk Identification Was Treated as a Strategic Advantage?⁠

• ⁠Risk Tolerance Governance: Turning Boundaries into Strategic Advantage⁠

• ⁠From Approval to Impact: Repositioning Risk Appetite as a Board Tool⁠

• ⁠Building Psychological Safety in Risk Management⁠

🎓 Download your CPD certificate:

⁠The CPD Group – Accreditation #800155

⁠

---

Recap Blog: Risk Transformation Starts with Mindset, Not Metrics, with Samantha Regan

"You can’t transform what you don’t understand. And you can’t operationalise change without trust." – Samantha Regan

In this RiskMasters episode, Samantha Regan shares the hard-earned lessons and emerging practices behind modern risk transformation from regulatory pressure to cultural renewal, from AI to agility.

Beyond the Buzzword: What Risk Transformation Really Looks Like

Samantha unpacks a common myth: that transformation means big frameworks or new software. In reality, it’s about clarifying the business problem, defining meaningful outcomes, and aligning people, tech, and behaviours around a shared purpose.

“Transformation can be reinvention or it can be refining what you already do. The key is knowing what success actually looks like.”

She emphasises the power of simplicity, problem clarity, and stakeholder involvement at every stage from the front line to the boardroom.

AI as Enabler, Not Replacement

Generative AI holds promise for lifting repetitive tasks and simplifying compliance workloads but Samantha is clear: it’s about freeing up human focus, not replacing it.

She outlines three transformation pillars:

1. Simplify the framework and clarify responsibilities

2. Embrace modern tech and data

3. Re-skill the function for agility, critical thinking, and digital fluency

“AI helps structure the unstructured. That’s where real value lies — not just automation, but insight.”

Culture Is the Real Differentiator

The toughest transformation, she argues, is cultural. Aligning behaviour to risk expectations requires more than training modules; it needs leadership buy-in, speak-up environments, and a daily habit of asking better questions.

“Everyone should think and act like a risk manager, not just the second line.”

Leadership for the Next Era

Samantha calls for leaders who foster critical thinking, promote psychological safety, and guide teams through uncertainty with clarity and humility.

Her vision for the future-ready risk function?

• Data-driven

• Adaptive

• Human-centred

• Embedded into strategy

• Positioned to lead, not just oversee

Key Takeaways

✔ Define success early and keep transformation outcome-focused

✔ Use AI to reduce low-value tasks, not remove human oversight

✔ Build a risk-aware culture that supports curiosity, clarity, and confidence

✔ Re-skill teams around agility, collaboration, and insight generation

✔ Elevate compliance to strategic partner status, not post-facto reviewer