We’re making it official: After more than a decade of operating as “The Financial Risk Group,” we’re changing our name to reflect what our clients have called us since the early days. We are excited to formally debut our streamlined “FRG” brand and logo.
Our new look is a natural progression from where we started 14 years ago, when the three founding partners of this company set a lofty goal. We wanted to become the premier risk management consulting company. It seemed ambitious, considering we were operating out of Ron Holanek’s basement at the time, but we knew we had at least two things going for us: a solid business plan and a drive to do whatever it took to deliver success for our clients.
And look at us now. It would take a while to list everything we’ve accomplished over the last decade plus, but here’s a quick run down of some of the items we’ve crossed off the company bucket list since 2006.
- We’ve grown our numbers from the original three to more than 50 talented risk consultants, analysts, and developers.
- We moved out of the basement (it would have been a tight fit, considering). We settled in historic downtown Cary in 2008, but quickly spilled out of our main office there and into several satellite locations. In 2018 we bought an older building a few blocks away and renovated it to a gleaming modern office hub for our US headquarters.
- We opened offices in Toronto, Canada and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to better serve our clients around the world.
- We opened several new business units, expanding on our original core focus of delivering automated technology solutions. Adding dedicated Data and Risk, Business Analytics, and Platform Hosting teams enlarged our wheelhouse, so that we have experts that can walk our clients through the entire lifecycle of risk management programs. (Shameless plug: you can learn more about a number of them via a series of videos that are sprinkled throughout the website). We now also work with institutional investors on innovative models and product offerings to help streamline processes and drive excess returns.
- We formalized our NEET (New Employee Excellence Training) apprenticeship program, so we can nurture and enhance the specific blend of skills that risk management professionals need to solve real-world business challenges. The program has struck a chord with our clients, so we built a program to recruit and develop risk management talent for them, as well.
Obviously, we couldn’t have done any of this without continued trust and support from our clients. Our clientele represents a cross section of the world’s largest banking, capital markets, insurance, energy and commodity firms – stretching across continents and across industries – and we recognize that they’re some very smart people. When they talk, we listen, and what they have been saying for a few years now is that the brand we started with in 2006 should evolve with the evolution of the company.
It is natural for people to streamline words into acronyms. In our industry, there are many, and knowing them is very important to our job. Our clients, partners, and even our internal teams used FRG from day one, but now is the time to make it official. By rebranding and fully embracing the FRG name, we hope that it, too, becomes a well-known acronym in the risk management space, one that people equate with integrity and quality of work.
So we’re celebrating 2020 with the new name, a new look, and a new logo. But it’s like they say. The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s why you can be sure that our core values, our core principle – to fulfill our clients’ needs, while surpassing their expectations – still guide us every day. We are our reputation. We are FRG.
Mike Forno is a Partner and Senior Director of Sales with FRG.