Single-person dependency flagged on routine resilience check
A trust officer notices twelve structures have no documented deputy on the cover matrix.
It is Monday morning at Ardennes Trust Company. Helena Marquand, a senior trust officer, is working through the quarterly operational-resilience check. She opens the cover matrix and finds twelve active structures listed against a single administrator, Ravi Okonkwo, with no documented deputy and no recent cross-training entry. None of these structures are non-compliant — every CDD review is in date, every fee is correctly raised — but the operating model has a clear single point of failure. She raises a watch-list item against RSK-014, the firm's key-person dependency risk, so it cannot be lost in her inbox.
- 1RiskAlign treats an undocumented deputy on more than ten structures as a watch-list signal against the firm's key-person dependency risk (RSK-014).
- 2Raising as a watch-list item — not yet an incident — preserves the four-eyes principle: Helena cannot self-escalate without review.
- 3The flag is timestamped and visible to the COO and the Head of Trust in the same queue.
Ardennes is a fictional Jersey trust company. All names, timestamps, hashes and figures in this tour are illustrative.