Rick McFeely
Global Chief Security Officer, EY
As global chief security officer, Rick McFeely moved his global team away from traditional security programs into adopting a very mature crisis management and business continuity planning model.
With his experience and background with the FBI, he aggressively matured EY’s security model to plan and prepare for the expected and unexpected, said Joe Watt, global risk management leader at EY Global.
“By leveraging technology and strengthening his relationships with EY leaders, Rick has enabled us to work together effectively and efficiently when an emergency rises,” Watt said. “Rick has built a foundation of leadership and trust across EY. His professionalism, steady hand and positive energy guide us to successfully manage security risks.”
The recent pandemic taught McFeely that success during a crisis means approaching business continuity planning at an enterprise level and that true resiliency involves the involvement of many key enterprise functions such as finance, talent, communications, real estate and more.
“The last two years of navigating a global pandemic have provided unprecedented opportunity for today’s CSO to become the chief advocate of building his/her company’s crisis response and business continuity plans and moving well beyond traditional security disciplines,” McFeely said.
Why Watch
In 2022, McFeely and his team are focused on defining all the impacts that a crisis can bring and drafting mitigation plans around them. These include economic impacts like short-term inflation and currency devaluation, political impacts such as sanctions, financial systems impacts like banking systems at risk, and cyber and workforce impacts.
Additionally, McFeely and his team have modified EY’s table top exercises around a more nimble model of addressing the main issues that invariably arise in any crisis such as, “When should command and control be escalated from a local to an area to a global response?” This allows them to walk through a topic fully without going down proverbial rabbit holes that come up when trying to resolve the entire exercise in one sitting.
