An evening of connection and discussions.
Last Thursday, MAM Gruppe brought together senior GRC, Legal, Compliance and Finance professionals for an evening of conversation, connection, and genuinely sharp thinking, at the Sofitel Frankfurt Opera hotel.
It's rare that a dinner with professionals from across the GRC landscape leaves you thinking about your organisational design on the way home. But that's exactly what happened.
Hosted by our Managing Director for Legal, Compliance and Finance, Lee Clack, and co-founder and CEO Mazhar Mahmood, the evening brought together a select group of compliance, risk and legal leaders for a dinner that was equal parts insight and good company.
From Integrated GRC to Operational Resilience.
The keynote was delivered by Tjerk Schlufter, Head of Business Continuity at Helios Kliniken, who took the room through a compelling case for why siloed risk and compliance functions are no longer fit for purpose.
Tjerk's central argument was disarmingly simple: "No risk is isolated. Our structures still are." He illustrated just how quickly a distant event can cascade through your supply chain, your regulatory obligations, and your operational resilience in one move.
He laid out five reasons why an integrated GRC function is the obvious next step for organisations of scale: decision advantage, managing regulatory complexity, a smarter lens on M&A risk, building a genuine risk culture, and, perhaps most overlooked, the ability to attract and retain top talent by offering roles that actually matter.
The core of the model Tjerk described centres on a unified data framework, one source of truth, one language, one picture, spanning risk strategy, analytics, controls, and culture. Not a framework for its own sake, but a competitive edge.
AI: opportunity, challenge, and a question nobody can quite answer yet
The second part of the evening moved into agentic AI and its implications for GRC, and this is where the table came alive.
From monitoring at scale, to connecting compliance signals across complex organisations, to enabling faster and better-informed judgement, the use cases are genuinely exciting. But so are the governance questions that come with them. The room was clear-eyed: AI is an opportunity, but it is also a challenge and, for some, a threat. How do you govern something that is moving faster than your regulatory frameworks? Who owns the risk when an AI system makes the call?
There were no tidy answers... and that was arguably the point. The discussion was honest, grounded, and refreshingly free of the hype that tends to dominate AI conversations at the moment.
Why did we decide to hold this event?
MAM Gruppe has built a strong reputation placing senior talent across Legal, Compliance, Risk and Finance in the German-speaking market. Events like this are part of how we stay close to the conversations that matter to our clients and candidates, not as observers, but as active participants.
We'll be hosting more evenings like this throughout 2025. If you'd like to be part of the conversation, we'd love to hear from you.
A huge thanks also to Akritta Bhatia, George Higgins, and Maqbool Mahmood for being there, and having some thought provoking conversation with guests. 
