About Widbrook
Widbrook Consulting is a senior risk and compliance practice based in the Western Cape and working nationally.
Our founder and principal
Claire Coustas
Founder and principal, Widbrook Consulting
Claire Coustas has spent twenty years helping organisations make good decisions in complicated, heavily regulated environments, most of it in banking, specialist lending and insurance, across South Africa and the United Kingdom.
She has built enterprise risk and compliance frameworks from nothing and rebuilt ones that had stopped working. She has led risk transformation programmes, reported to boards and executive committees, and deputised for chief risk officers. She created a new risk management function for a South African insurance group inside twelve months, and led enterprise risk governance across a mid-sized UK specialist lender, covering risk appetite, executive and board reporting and risk culture. She also led a twenty-person enhanced due diligence team investigating higher-risk clients, politically exposed persons, sanctions and adverse media, which is where she learned that financial crime controls are only worth what the decisions behind them can withstand.
She has sat opposite regulators in both countries: in South Africa, the Reserve Bank and the Prudential Authority; in the United Kingdom, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Bank of England.
The work she was proudest of was rarely the framework. It was getting a board pack down to something a board could argue with.
If you engage Widbrook, she leads your work from the first call to the last.
Postgraduate Diploma in Governance, Risk and Compliance, International Compliance Association
Bachelor of Commerce in Law, University of South Africa
Certificate in Internal Auditing, University of Pretoria
Certified GDPR Practitioner
The practice is new, and you should hear that from us
Widbrook opened in October 2026. Twenty years of this work sits behind it, but the practice itself is new and we are not going to dress it up as something older.
Founding terms
[Founding client terms for the first year, to be confirmed.]
Referees
Three referees from our founder’s career, on the page rather than on request, so you can check what working with us is like before you spend time on a call. [Name, role and organisation, how they worked with our founder, and how to reach them. Three entries, each with the referee’s written agreement to be named.]
The name
[The name Widbrook comes from ...]
We are not attorneys, and we will tell you when something needs one.
How we work
The uncomfortable finding goes in the summary, not the appendix.
You see findings in draft. You can correct a fact; you cannot change a conclusion.
If what we design makes your business harder to run, we have designed it badly.
No document is longer than it needs to be, and every plan names who does what.
We work alongside your people, so what gets built can be run after we leave.
If what you need is a recognised firm’s name on the cover page, because a funder or an acquirer has asked for one, we will tell you to buy that.
If your arrangements are sound, we will tell you so.
Questions to ask before engaging us
Professional indemnity
[Insurer, limit of indemnity, date cover commences.]
The cap on liability
Our engagement terms limit liability to [amount or multiple]. Professional indemnity cover without the contractual cap is half the picture, so both are stated here.
Who reviews the work
[Named peer reviewer and arrangement.]
Subcontracting
[Confirm: does the practice ever use associates? If never, say so as an absolute. If sometimes, say how the work is supervised.]
Conflicts
We run a conflicts check before accepting any engagement and will decline work where a conflict exists or is likely to arise. We do not act for direct competitors in the same market at the same time without the knowledge of both. Where we have acted for one business in a sector and are approached by another later, we will tell you and you can decide.
Reviewing our own work
If we review your arrangements and find gaps, we are then in a position to quote for fixing them. The review is priced and delivered as a review. You are under no obligation to use us for the remediation, and we will say so in writing when the report is delivered.
Your information
Client material is held [where], for [how long], and is returned or destroyed at the end of the engagement on your instruction. Our founder and principal is the practice’s Information Officer, [registered with the Information Regulator under reference number].
Capacity
The practice takes a small number of clients at a time. If we cannot give an engagement the attention it needs, we will say so rather than take it. For work across multiple sites, capacity is agreed at scoping and stated in the engagement letter.
Complaints
[Route beyond the practice: professional body, membership, disciplinary process.]
B-BBEE
[Status, affidavit or certificate, for your vendor onboarding pack.]
Start a conversation
A confidential call of about thirty minutes, at no cost, to work out whether we can help.
We reply personally, within one business day.