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I recently authored a whitepaper for the Society of Actuaries 2016 Risk Symposium, exploring the strategic value of risk management.

Here is the Abstract:  

Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place.

Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of

Manage operational risk as a separate entity while budgeting for increased operational risk demands

New York City, NY– May 6, 2015 – marcus evans, the world’s largest event management group, will host the Operational Risk Management Conference on September 16-17, 2015 in New York City, NY. This conference will bring together risk leaders to examine the exposures brought on by operational risk and how these must be accounted for in the business model, as well as focusing on techniques for demonst

Fraud Prevention & Financial professionals will join together to share cutting edge strategies and techniques to manage the growing area of fraud risk

New York, NY– April 29, 2015 – marcus evans, the world’s largest event management group, will host the Fraud Prevention for Financial Institutions Conference on August 12-13, 2015 in New York, NY. This premiere forum will provide a dynamic environment for senior practitioners to: leverage intelligence and analytics to better understand behavioral

How to Really Link Strategy with Execution

Most companies implicitly execute as if they were pursuing a Best Product commodity strategy. No degree of competent execution can save them from this never-ending treadmill. The core processes of the company need to be aligned to the chosen strategy in order to make progress against their strategic agenda and avoid a commodity-like outcome. The Delta Model identifies the core processes of the business and provides a guide for how they need to function d

Interview with Paul Emerson, Vice President, Asset Allocation, Risk Management at AllianceBernstein, L.P.

Operational risk management has moved beyond the simple calculation of capital requirements. Today operational risk managers need to have a proactive, holistic approach to operational risk to ensure they maintain their organizations’ profitability and reputation. Recent financial scandals have shown that operational risk could bring tremendous losses and not every firm is capable of recoverin

Operational risk management has evolved from the simple calculation of capital requirements to a proactive, holistic approach. This new strategy ensures that operational risk managers maintain their organizations’ profitability and brand reputation. In fact, recent financial scandals revealed that operational risk can result in incredible losses that many organizations can sometimes never fully recover from.

According to Ger Jan Meijer, Director of Operational Risk Management for Citco Fund Servi

Operational risk management has moved beyond the simple calculation of capital requirements. Today operational risk managers need to have a proactive, holistic approach to operational risk to ensure they maintain their organizations’ profitability and reputation. Recent financial scandals have shown that operational risk could bring tremendous losses and not every firm is capable of recovering from them.

Paul Emerson answered a series of questions written by GFMI before the forthcoming Proactive

Enterprise Risk Management means alternate things to different people but the general angle risk analysts seem to take; is to create a risk assessment program or tick list sheet, then torture staff in their company to assess what they often don't fully understand.  This is fine but that is not Enterprise Risk Management in my opinion.  ERM is beyond simple risk assessments or check lists and it should consider a much wider charter of risk exposure quantification in the company.

In the presentatio

A recent poll on whether enterprise risk frameworks should employ a risk taxonomy or not, seems to have turned out an encouraging result. Over 93% of risk practitioners voting gave a thumbs up for risk categorisation, with only a handful of souls repelling the concept.

In this posting we look at four steps to bring a risk taxonomy into operation and a Dendrogram Cluster Report model is demonstrated that shows how risk can be prioritize within a taxonomy.

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I have been reading a lot of posts on many different risk forums of late and it appears that the Frequency x Magnitude argument for measuring operational risk, is a stubborn pandemic and a failing that is going to be nearly impossible to move on from.

How do we really measure operational risk?

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Over the last few days, several people have discussed various scenario analysis techniques with me and going on general opinion, this risk assessment technique is very popular among operational risk analysts. Definitely no doubt there, but what scenario analysis means to one analyst, can often be something entirely different to another.

What does scenario analysis really mean to operational risk analysts?

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The ten success stories of Basel II are not unique in anyway and there are plenty of other aspects to the Basel II initiative that supported an improved risk function in banks. None the less, these ten risk framework efforts seem to keep appearing as common "this is an excellent element to our risk framework and has evolved our risk management practice in the bank".

Click here to see the top 10 successes and failures

On the G31000 LinkedIn risk forum, we have decided to open up a new "chat room" that is dedicated to the application of the ISO 31000 enterprise risk management standard to Banking, Insurance, Supply Chain Finance, Markets and Investment.

The effort today is to develop a Monte Carlo simulation in Excel that works for operational risk losses rather than market or credit risk, where the technique is so often found. The objective is to build a fully working Microsoft Excel model which isn't just statistical theory but actually exemplifies the Monte Carlo simulation process in practice.

Click here to review and download the Monte Carlo example

The question today is, does the use of a risk framework such as the one proposed under ISO 31000 reduce risk management disputes between managers in a company?

A possible upside we look for once a risk framework is in full operation, is an improvement in the sharing of risk knowledge and business intel. It could of course go the other way as well; where the risk framework actually does more harm than good and drives bickering or discontinuity between departmental managers?

What did the G31000 foru

Perhaps ten years ago, reporting risk profiles or organisational threats was a challenging thing to do for many risk analysts on the job and while the majority of risk reports were fundamentally ordinary, it became apparent quite quickly that a simple list of hazards was never going to cut it.

In this blog we look at an emerging era of risk reporting.

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