MTN Group Limited
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Effective risk management is the cornerstone of our enterprise, ensuring operational integrity and fostering excellence.
At MTN, we adopt a holistic approach to risk management, integrating it across our entire organisation to empower management in actively identifying and addressing risks and opportunities affecting our strategic and operational goals. We prioritise risk management as a fundamental skill, fostering a risk-aware culture through top-down, bottom-up and emerging risk scanning methods. This approach guarantees comprehensive coverage, alignment with our business scale and the efficacy of our mitigation strategies, focusing on the most significant risks after considering potential event likelihoods, impacts and the strength of current mitigations and controls.
The MTN Board and its committees are committed to thorough oversight of our integrated risk management framework, engaging consistently with management to cover a broad range of activities and affirm risk management effectiveness.
Furthermore, Opco-level risks receive detailed attention at both the Opco executive committees and Opco audit and risk committees, ensuring local concerns are adequately addressed and integrated into our wider risk management strategy.
A critical aspect of ERM is employing a structured principal risk universe. Initially, this risk universe establishes a two-level categorisation system, facilitating consistent risk mapping across all Opcos through bottom-up integration, ensuring uniformity. Simultaneously, from a top-down viewpoint, it aids management in ensuring that risk identification is exhaustive. Being dynamic, the principal risk universe undergoes regular updates to align with shifts in strategy, structure and operations.
MTN's risk appetite framework and related declarations are made actionable by assigning specific risk preferences to each principal risk. This process is crucial for defining mitigation strategies and allocating resources effectively. For each principal risk, we formulate KRIs and establish tolerance thresholds to actualise and implement the Board's risk appetite directives.
Furthermore, we integrate risk appetite and tolerance thresholds within our business planning and decision-making processes. This integration is vital for adapting to an ever-changing business landscape and ensuring our exposure to risk remains within our predetermined preferences, especially as we aim to achieve our Ambition 2025 objectives.
Beyond categorising risks and identifying principal risks for thorough risk detection, our proactive risk management approach integrates stress testing, reverse stress testing, and catastrophic scenario analysis. We subject various budget aspects at both the Opco and MTN Group levels to stress testing, creating high-level response strategies for each potential situation. The catastrophic scenarios we examine include significant devaluation in a key market's currency, challenges in renewing licences or facing nationalisation in key markets, the collapse of a major network provider, a debilitating cyber-attack on extensive network sections, and swift technological shifts from traditional voice services to data/digital platforms. We also conduct reverse stress tests to identify conditions that could precipitate a severe liquidity crunch, reinforcing our commitment to robust and anticipatory risk management.
Our dedication to a proactive compliance strategy led to enhancements in our compliance programme, ensuring adherence to obligations and anticipation of potential risks. We prioritised compliance monitoring and testing, assessing the robustness of our control environment. Our commitment was evident in the advancement of our internal control improvement programme. We also made significant progress in executing our data privacy initiative and augmenting data protection protocols. Moreover, we intensified efforts to verify trade partner compliance, emphasising the importance of maintaining high compliance standards across all partnerships.
We dedicate our efforts to fostering a business continuity culture and enhancing resilience maturity across our markets, efforts that have been instrumental in sustaining our ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management certification in key markets. Our ongoing investment in various initiatives aimed at bolstering our recovery capabilities underscores our commitment to preparedness and adaptability throughout MTN. Specifically, we have implemented a robust network resilience improvement plan in South Africa to augment network availability and service continuity during loadshedding. Additionally, our proactive plan to eliminate single points of failure in our network infrastructure has significantly bolstered overall network resilience, minimising vulnerabilities and ensuring uninterrupted service delivery. In response to global macroeconomic fluctuations, port congestion and supply chain vulnerabilities, we executed a targeted supply chain resilience plan. We also engaged in comprehensive executive crisis simulations to evaluate and enhance our company's response strategies, gleaning critical insights that informed the refinement of our crisis management protocols. Furthermore, our intensified efforts in threat monitoring and risk intelligence, through external risk horizon scanning, have enabled us to detect and forecast emerging trends and potential threats, facilitating timely and effective risk mitigation.
MTN adopts a combined assurance approach to improve and maximise the effectiveness of risk, governance and control oversight in risk management. This guarantees that the range of assurance services, offered by both internal and external entities, effectively covers the significant risks the Group confronts. It also aims to confirm that appropriate controls are in place to mitigate these key risks within established risk thresholds.