I am reminded time and again, in organisation after organisation, of the tendency to take a basic product or service and over complicate it until it’s “broken”. And if you want examples, look no further than support functions in organisations. Whether they be finance, procurement, risk or records management. Unless you have pro-actively resisted the temptation, every end user will tell you, “the system is over complicated”.

If your system is over complicated, your challenge to engage with and ben

Much effort is being expended, rightly so, in addressing cyber risks. However, it is a frustrating exercise since new risks and threat vectors are arising daily, even hourly. If you would like to stop playing cyber wack-a-mole and get on the offensive watch this video. It only takes 5 minutes and will explain why understanding and managing your cyber exposures provides a way to take the offensive.

Hope you enjoy and gain something from it.

Managing Cyber Exposure Video

By now, the Wells Fargo scandal is already beginning to become a memory. While the public may forget their costly mistake in time, theirs is a lesson you should definitely commit to memory. Wells Fargo’s failure could easily be your own without taking proper steps to avoid mistakes made by management.

Besides not keeping track of employees as they should have, Wells Fargo made the tragic mistake of incentivizing sales over the interests of their customers. Rather than reward employees for providi

Ruben Cohen is an operational risk consultant. He has been working in the financial industry for over 17 years, with most of the last 10 in operational risk analytics at Citi.
Prior to that, Ruben spent 10 years on the faculty of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Rice University in Houston, specializing in Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from M.I.T. and has subsequently obtained an M.A. in Economics from McGill University.
Ruben is based

Operational risk management is currently on the end of a major shakeup. Ever since the announcement of Basel III banks have been working within a paradigm that pushes towards either TSA or AMA approaches (standardised and advanced approaches respectively). At the end of 2015, however, the Basel Committee shocked firms by announcing that they were doing away with this, and replacing it with the SMA – a new standardized approach that would be the norm for all banks. This is having huge ramificatio

Heavy reliance on systems and technology exposes firms to higher levels of risk and threats in this area due to these threats constantly changing. Hence, it is important for organizations to equip themselves with up to date with IT and cyber threats, along with ensuring a strong fraud management program in place, managing outsourcing and third party risk and keeping up with the regulatory expectations.

Representatives from established financial institutions and associations are joining hands to b

Yesterday I was talking to “Phil”, who I mentor, about how well he was standing in the shoes of others when working with them.  Understanding them helps you to advise them.

Phil was telling me about a meeting he had with someone from audit that came asking for his help.  He soon realised that they were not clear on why they were meeting with him and he decided to help them become clear.  He explained it would be best to think more about the questions they needed to ask and that they should come b

The Biggest Heist in Human History: Three Trillion Dollars Injected by the Fed into the Financial System

Source:

Mike Whitney

Global Research, October 02, 2016

CounterPunch, 30 September 2016

Here’s your economics quiz for the day:

Question 1– What do you think would happen if you put $3 trillion into the financial system?

a–Stock prices would rise

b–Stock prices would fall

c–Stock prices would stay the same

Question 2– What do you think would happen if you put $3 trillion into the economy? (Via fiscal st

The Insurance industry is facing extensive operational challenges with disruptive market and consumer changes leaving insurers with no choice: innovate or die.

 As a result, many are undertaking a complete top-to-bottom transformation. One such U.S insurer is Liberty Mutual, who are exploring new ways to automate and operationalize to transform their processes.

PEX network spoke to the Director or Special Projects – Process and Technology, Sidharth Grover, to find out what he and his team are look

Wells Fargo recently paid $185 million in penalties – the highest fine levied by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) since it began operations in 2011 – for inappropriate sales practices. Millions of accounts were set up without customer consent, in many instances generating overdraft charges and other fees. The CFPB referred to the Wells Fargo activities as “widespread,” and 5,300 employees have been fired.

The Wells Fargo scandal is on the level of those at Volkswagen,Wendy’s, Chipo

Top Bank Fraud Expert: ALL of the Big Banks’ Profits Come from FRAUD

Source:

Washington's Blog

22 September 2016

The country’s top white collar crime expert, William Black – who put over 1,000 top S&L executives in jail for fraud, and is a professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri – confirmed recently what the alternative media has been saying for years: the business plan of Wall Street is fraud. That’s their key profit center.

Black also says that a British parliamentary investiga

The iPhone has a vulnerability called the Signaling System 7 (SS7) that allows crooks to hack into the device.

This was demonstrated on a recent “60 Minutes” episode in which a U.S. congressman (with his permission) had his iPhone hacked by German cybersecurity experts. The white-hat hackers got his phone number and eavesdropped on the conversation.

Penetration of the flawed SS7 makes it possible to listen in on conversations, intercept texts and track the victim’s movements. The congressman subse

What's your biggest cybersecurity risk?  Chances are it's that you're using the wrong methods to assess that risk!

Douglas W. Hubbard, author of big sellers How to Measure Anything and The Failure of Risk Management, now has done a new book, How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk.  He and I are teaming up to offer a one-day short course on the subject at the Holiday Inn in Rosslyn (Arlington), Virginia, Thursday, October 6.  The course includes training in calibration of your risk assessme

Commonwealth Capital LLC, a venture capital management company, announced today that it has launched the Commonwealth Capital Income Fund-I to provide investment capital exclusively for startups and early-stage companies.

            The company also launched a new microsite at www.commonwealthcapital.fund  to assist capital seekers.  Entrepreneurs can sign up now and be matched with a no-cost, personal funding concierge who guides them through a standardized process for fund eligibility.

When building a business case for risk management software, independent validations of customer success stories speak louder than marketing claims. Winona Health won the 2016 GRC Value Award, granted by industry analyst firm GRC 20/20. Winona’s rapid success with risk management software is just one example of just how powerful and versatile deployments are when they have: a true risk-based support, robust taxonomy technology, and flexible Software-as-a-Service deliveries.

As described in the cas

Three Key Ideas Shaping the Future of Innovation

Source:

Innovation@ Work Blog, MIT

Your company’s key innovators are, most likely, your consumers

The wave of technological innovation we are currently riding has brought us wearable computing and 3D printing, with products like Google Glass and Nike Fuelband becoming the stars of recent tech conferences, including May's All Things D. Continually fueled by the question “what’s next?,” product innovators leave no stone unturned in their quest to produc

Source:

Ellen Brown

Web of Debt

16 September 2016

Several central banks, including the Bank of England, the People’s Bank of China, the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve, are exploring the concept of issuing their own digital currencies, using the blockchain technology developed for Bitcoin. Skeptical commentators suspect that their primary goal is to eliminate cash, setting us up for negative interest rates (we pay the bank to hold our deposits rather than the reverse).

But Ben Broadbent, Deput

Many years ago when you were on vacation, before Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were invented (assuming you were an adult then), you had a great time, right? You weren’t “connected,” because there was no social media to be connected with.

If today you can’t imagine being disconnected from social media while on vacation, ask yourself how this can be, if years ago, you never missed what had not yet been invented.

And what about constantly checking e-mail while on vacation? Or constantly perusing va

Wells Fargo, till recently, had earned itself a good reputation as a financial institution mainly due to the fact that it escaped from the Recession largely unscathed. That has come under huge scrutiny with the latest scandal that has hit the bank. It has been accused of creating 2 million fake account in the form of bank account and credit cards in the name of existing customers. This was mainly done to increase the commissions that the employees would earn for bringing in new accounts and meet