Integrating enterprise and project risk management at the Nordic Development Fund with Inclus
Nordic Development Fund (NDF) needed a targeted, flexible risk management solution that could connect seamlessly with its existing data infrastructure, without the bloat of large commercial platforms. Inclus became that solution.
A central requirement for NDF was integration with its existing Power Platform infrastructure. Project data should be pulled from the Power Apps environment into Inclus and pushed back out into Power BI for reporting.
Introduction
The Nordic Development Fund (NDF) is a multilateral development finance institution owned by the five Nordic countries - Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.
NDF finances climate-focused development projects in partnership with major international actors such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the Asian Development Bank, as well as private sector partners.
Despite its small size, just 32 staff members, NDF operates in complex, high-risk environments and has strong data reporting obligations to its owners and stakeholders.
The challenge: building a holistic risk framework from scratch
NDF had a well-established project management infrastructure built on Microsoft's Power Platform, including Power Apps and Power BI. However, the organisation recognised significant gaps in how it managed enterprise risk more broadly.
"Our project and financial risks were well in place for a while, but then we realised that we had gaps in other areas such as people and IT risks, so we started to take a broader view. As a small organisation, it didn't make sense to have lots of silos. We needed a very holistic approach to risk management."
Amanda Hajnal, Risk and Systems Manager at NDF
This led to the development of a new risk management policy covering both investment (project) risk and enterprise-wide risks, including legal, IT, financial, and people risks.
The next step was finding the right tool to collect and manage all of this data.
Finding the right fit
NDF evaluated a wide range of tools on the market, including large international platforms. These were quickly ruled out as overly complex and expensive for NDF's needs.
"We were looking for something that was really targeted to what we wanted; not a massive platform that we'd have to pay for and maybe never fully use."
Inclus stood out for two key reasons: its right-sized scope and its shared understanding of the risk environments NDF operates in.
The organisations found common ground through a background connected to development work, including prior collaboration with CMI (Crisis Management Initiative). This alignment of values that went beyond commercial fit was one of the decisive factors.
A technically novel integration
A central requirement for NDF was deep integration with its existing Power Platform infrastructure. The organisation needed to both pull project data from its Power Apps environment into Inclus and push data back out into Power BI for executive reporting.
This two-way data flow was genuinely new territory. It required close collaboration between NDF, Inclus, Nordic Investment Bank (which administers NDF's IT systems), and Solita, NDF's Power Platform service provider.
None of the parties involved had previously implemented this type of API-based integration with a risk management tool.
"It was a very exciting process, and a real learning curve for everyone involved. Juha Törmänen at Inclus was really important and worked very hard on getting the solutions right."
A deliberate design principle guided the process: keep it simple and selective. Only the parameters that were truly necessary were mapped between systems, ensuring data flows were meaningful and manageable.
How NDF uses the solution today
With the integration in place, Inclus now serves multiple levels of NDF's operations:
Program managers access live, project-level risk data directly within their Power Apps environment, tracking risk likelihood, impact, risk owners, and action deadlines. This supports risk-based project monitoring, including helping managers prioritise which projects to visit on field missions.
The risk manager uses aggregated data to report quarterly to NDF's risk committee, with detailed metrics and visualisations showing how risks are evolving across the portfolio.
Executive management draws on quarterly risk data to inform key organisational decisions, with a view across both project and enterprise risks.
The board receives twice-yearly updates and an annual report, covering performance across all risk categories. Amanda recently presented Inclus-generated reports directly to the board: "They were very pleased with the results. The data is really robust and it visually looks very, very good. It has added a lot of value to NDF’s reporting and monitoring."
NDF is also now implementing incident management within Inclus, to track and follow up on environmental, social, and operational incidents reported by partners — an important element of NDF's monitoring responsibilities.
Why risk management matters more than ever
Amanda reflects on the broader significance of what NDF has built:
"Boards are very interested in how an organisation is performing and how much resilience there is. Risk is a very important part of that picture. You need to invest in your organisational resilience; otherwise, the risks can in the worst case take over the business."
She notes that risk management is still relatively new in the international development and NGO space, but that its importance is now firmly recognised.
"You need the data and a good tool to do that. What Inclus is doing is really important, and we see Inclus as an important partner in that."
NDF's story illustrates how even a small organisation with limited resources can build a robust, integrated enterprise risk management capability when the right tool, the right partners, and the right mindset come together.