Three Languages, One Boardroom

Technology risk reaches a board only in translation. It is spoken first in the language of the engineers who run the systems, then in the language of the supervisor whose Directions govern them, and only last in the language the board must answer in: fiduciary judgment. A board is seldom short of information in the first two. What it needs is a dependable means of carrying meaning between them without loss.

The Reserve Bank’s Directions of July 2026 recognise as much. By requiring a commercial bank’s IT Strategy Committee to be chaired by an independent director of seven years’ technology experience, they seat a translator at the head of the table. It is a sound provision, quietly limited. It secures the translator, and leaves the translation itself where it has always lived: in the fluency of one person rather than in the architecture of the board.

Fluency of that kind is a gift to any board, held on loan. Terms end. Successors arrive qualified, and new. The institution discovers, in a difficult quarter, that what it took for an architecture was a person, and that its minutes, read by an examiner, record much received and little decided.

Oversight of technology is therefore a matter of record before it is a matter of expertise. The board that governs digital risk on its own terms is the one whose understanding survives the departure of whoever first supplied it. How that understanding is held, and by whom, is where The Candid Conversation begins.