COSO ERM Financial Risk Governance Training Course

Course overview

Finance and accounting teams are expected to identify material risks early, explain their financial implications, and show that controls, limits, and escalation routes are working. Yet risk registers often sit separately from budgeting, forecasting, treasury, financial reporting, and internal control activities. This creates weak risk ownership, inconsistent risk assessments, unclear board reporting, and late responses to liquidity, credit, market, fraud, tax, and financial reporting risks. This course helps participants build a financial risk governance structure using the COSO Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) Framework.

Participants examine the five COSO ERM components—Governance and Culture, Strategy and Objective-Setting, Performance, Review and Revision, and Information, Communication and Reporting—and apply them to finance-led risk decisions. They learn to define risk appetite and tolerance statements, identify financial risk events and drivers, assess inherent and residual risk, design risk indicators, map controls to risks, assign ownership, and prepare concise management and board-level risk reports. Practical work uses finance scenarios involving cash-flow pressure, covenant breaches, receivables concentration, foreign-exchange exposure, revenue recognition, and control failures.

The course is delivered through instructor-led explanation, facilitated workshops, worked examples, group critiques, and spreadsheet-based risk analysis. Participants develop a COSO-aligned financial risk governance pack containing a finance risk taxonomy, appetite metrics, risk-and-control register, key risk indicator dashboard, escalation workflow, and reporting template. This pack provides a usable starting point for strengthening governance in a finance function, business unit, treasury team, or corporate risk programme.

It is suited to finance professionals who contribute to risk, controls, planning, assurance, or governance decisions and need a disciplined method for linking enterprise risk management to financial performance and reporting.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Interpret the 2017 COSO ERM Framework and map its five components to finance and accounting governance activities
• Develop a financial risk taxonomy covering liquidity, credit, market, operational, reporting, tax, and fraud risks
• Draft risk appetite statements, tolerance thresholds, and breach triggers for material financial exposures
• Assess inherent and residual financial risk using likelihood, impact, velocity, and control-effectiveness criteria
• Build a risk-and-control register that links risk events, drivers, controls, owners, evidence, and residual ratings
• Design key risk indicators and Excel-based dashboards for liquidity, receivables, covenant, and control-risk monitoring
• Create escalation routes and management reporting packs for risk-limit breaches and emerging financial risks
• Produce a COSO-aligned financial risk governance action plan for implementation in a finance function

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Finance Managers — who must connect financial performance oversight with documented risk ownership and escalation
• Financial Controllers — who oversee reporting controls, close processes, and financial risk evidence
• Risk Managers — who need to apply COSO ERM in collaboration with finance and accounting stakeholders
• Treasury Managers — who manage liquidity, funding, foreign-exchange, interest-rate, and covenant exposures
• Internal Auditors — who assess whether financial risk governance and control monitoring are operating effectively
• FP&A Managers — who need to incorporate risk appetite, scenarios, and emerging risks into planning and forecasting

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should understand core finance and accounting concepts such as cash flow, budgeting, financial statements, internal controls, materiality, and management reporting. Experience in a finance, risk, audit, treasury, controllership, or planning role is useful because exercises use realistic financial exposures and governance decisions. Participants should be comfortable reviewing tables and using basic Microsoft Excel functions, filters, and charts. Prior knowledge of COSO ERM, risk quantification, Power BI, or formal risk-management certification is not required. Complete beginners should expect a structured introduction before progressing to applied risk-register and reporting work.

Training methodology

Instructor-led sessions introduce COSO ERM concepts through finance-specific examples, followed by guided exercises that convert the concepts into working governance artefacts. Participants assess a simulated organisation facing liquidity, receivables, foreign-exchange, reporting, and fraud exposures; calibrate ratings in small groups; and challenge each other’s control and ownership decisions. Excel is used to structure risk data and test indicator thresholds, while Power BI examples show reporting options. Each day adds to an individual financial risk governance pack, culminating in a peer-reviewed implementation plan for the participant’s own workplace.

Course outline

Day 1: COSO ERM and the financial governance context

• Purpose and structure of the 2017 COSO ERM Framework
• The five COSO ERM components and twenty principles
• Financial risk governance roles for boards, audit committees, executives, and finance leaders
• Relationship between enterprise risk management, internal control, and financial reporting
• Finance risk taxonomy design across liquidity, credit, market, operational, and compliance categories
• Risk culture, accountability, and challenge within finance teams
• Materiality and financial impact criteria for risk prioritisation

Workshop: Participants map a finance function’s current governance activities to the five COSO ERM components and identify ownership gaps.

Day 2: Risk identification, appetite, and assessment

• Risk event, cause, consequence, and control language for financial risks
• Risk identification methods using process walkthroughs, trigger questions, and scenario analysis
• Inherent risk and residual risk assessment methodology
• Likelihood, financial impact, velocity, persistence, and interdependency scoring criteria
• Risk appetite, tolerance, capacity, and limit-setting distinctions
• Financial appetite metrics for cash, leverage, covenant headroom, receivables, and earnings volatility
• Risk heat maps and prioritisation rules for management attention

Workshop: Using a cash-flow and covenant scenario, participants draft appetite thresholds, score inherent and residual risks, and create a prioritised risk heat map.

Day 3: Controls, treatment, and risk ownership

• Risk response choices: accept, avoid, pursue, reduce, and share
• Preventive, detective, corrective, and directive financial controls
• Control design versus control operating effectiveness
• Risk-and-control register fields and evidence requirements
• Segregation of duties and approval authority controls
• Control mapping for revenue recognition, close, payments, and receivables processes
• Risk owners, control owners, action owners, and three-lines coordination

Workshop: Participants build a risk-and-control register for a financial close and receivables process, including owners, evidence, actions, and residual ratings.

Day 4: Monitoring, reporting, and escalation

• Key risk indicator design and leading versus lagging measures
• KRI thresholds, trigger logic, frequency, and data ownership
• Excel risk register analysis using filters, pivot tables, and conditional formatting
• Power BI dashboard concepts for risk reporting
• Risk-limit breach escalation and issue-management workflows
• Management risk reports versus board and audit committee reporting
• Data quality, assurance, and narrative reporting for emerging financial risks

Workshop: Participants create an Excel-based KRI dashboard and escalation workflow for liquidity, aged receivables, and covenant-headroom breaches.

Day 5: Review, revision, and implementation planning

• COSO ERM review and revision principles
• Root-cause analysis after financial risk events and control failures
• Linking risk information to budgets, forecasts, stress tests, and capital decisions
• Scenario analysis for foreign-exchange, interest-rate, and customer-default exposures
• Risk reporting cadence and annual governance calendar design
• Implementation roadmap, stakeholder engagement, and change-management actions
• Measuring financial risk governance maturity and improvement progress

Workshop: Participants assemble and present a COSO-aligned financial risk governance pack and a 90-day implementation plan for peer and instructor review.

Tools & standards covered

COSO Enterprise Risk Management—Integrating with Strategy and Performance (2017), Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, ISO 31000:2018 Risk Management Guidelines

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions