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LONDON – Britain legalised gay marriage on Wednesday after Queen Elizabeth II gave her royal assent to a bill approved by lawmakers, the culture ministry said.

Same-sex couples will be able to marry from next year after Prime Minister David Cameron pushed the legislation through against the will of dozens of his own Conservative lawmakers.

Members of parliament cheered as they were told the historic bill, pushed through by Prime Minister David Cameron despite opposition within his own party, had p

Ishikawa Diagrams are often used to investigate how different risk factors can combine together to cause a specific outcome and are common techniques for quality control or defect inquires. The diagrams are quite popular because they are easy to understand and they can also be appraised by technical or non-technical managers alike.

Ishikawa Diagrams explained and demonstrated using R-Project in a couple of minutes.

More can be found here [ LINK ]

Risk Leadership: Qualified Risk Director - What Does It Take?

The Qualified Risk Directors Governance Council of the Directors and Chief Risk Officers Group (“the DCRO”) based in the US with members from “over 100 countries” has recently published Qualified Risk Director Guidelines.  The guidelines outline the skills and experience Boards and shareholder groups should be looking for when appointing Board members to boost oversight of Risk Management.

The guidelines state that Risk Directors shoul

Fifteen of the world’s top risk managers met recently at the 2013 RIMS Risk Summit. When the topic of reputational risk arose, the group struggled to develop a concrete value proposition, but unanimously agreed that no ERM assessment that failed to tackle reputation risk would be deemed complete by leadership.

Their recognition calls attention to one of the biggest hurdles confronted by risk managers in all industries when faced with high level risks deemed critical by the board or executive lead

A recent survey carried out by KPMG and the Economist Intelligence Unit finds that 81% of risk managers and executives fail to effectively capture risk appetite in their business models, what can we do?

In this blog posting I have linked to the new KPMG Expectations of Risk Management survey and included an infographic for fixing risk appetite.

More can be found here [ LINK ]

The Biggest Risks in an Internal Audit May Be the Issues You Miss Richard Chambers, CIA, CGAP, CCSA, CRMA, shares his personal reflections and insights on the internal audit profession. For many years, I taught accounting courses during the evenings at a local university.

I would often tell my students, “The only stupid question is the one that is never asked — unless the question is, 'Would you postpone the next exam?'” My years as a college instructor coincided with the early years of my inte

An interesting question was sent to me only the other day on Supply Chain Risk Management.

"Martin, do you have any specific risk frameworks or do you know of any good case studies that have been published on Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM)?".

Supply Chain Risk Management is a complex and intertwined risk initiative to kick off and we have included a schematic which outlines some of the requirements that may need to be covered. We have also linked to an absolutely fantastic white paper that is

We recently worked with Aite Group on a benchmark survey exploring the reconciliation challenges facing financial services firms. The benchmark threw up a number of interesting findings around issues such as an over-reliance on manual processes, delays in onboarding and issues in handling non-standard and inter-system recs. In this first of a series of blogs on the benchmark findings, I will examine how a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach no longer fits the bill.

Many banks are trying to use yesterday

Australia’s mining-relied economy is over

It is interesting to note that in his Jan 31st speech (see page 6-8) Gabriel Bernardino, Chairman of EIOPA, reiterated EIOPA’s intention to issue guidelines to national supervisors to ensure that from 2014 the supervisors and insurance entities are prepared for the Solvency II regime in a consistent way. 

The focus/priority of EIOPA now appears to be the aspects of the Solvency II regime that are management related, rather than Pillar 1 calculation related. The ‘certain important aspects’ covered

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

The Australian housing bubble is looking to be a bigger problem for that country than the U.S.' was in 2008-09. Australia differs from the U.S. both in terms of relative economic conditions and the health of its property markets. The mountain of debt is Australia is mostly private - housing - and dwarfs public-sector debt.

Australians have gone heavily into debt to buy houses that cost more than ever, especially the land component; and there's no sign this trend will end anytime soon. Mortgage de

The U.S. dollar is losing its status as the world's reserve currency. It's not happening all at once, but slowly and methodically as the dollar is used to settle international trade less and less. The Federal Reserve continues to rig the markets to foster weakness in gold (GLD) prices through a combination of continued ETF outflows and upheaval in the foreign exchange markets created by the debasement of the Japanese Yen (FXY) to support the notion of a strong dollar. This has sparked tremendous

A number of past financial crises have had their roots in countries pegging their currency to the U.S. dollar. The Thai baht was at the epicenter of the Asian Crisis of 1997/98. Argentina's hyperinflation of 2001/2 was also caused by a disastrous currency peg. Today there is not much left of that policy, but there are two notable exceptions and they are two of the most important currencies in Southeast Asia, the Singapore dollar (FXSG) and the Hong Kong dollar.

While their pegs are different in n

Vietnam's central bank cut interest rates again last week as inflation slowed, joining central banks from Sri Lanka and Australia to the ECB in easing monetary policy. It is seeking to spur lending and boost consumption after having to rein in a credit boom that has slowed economic growth to a 13-year low. But with the announcement that the Prime Minister's office had given its approval for the creation of the Vietnam Asset Management Company - a Vietnamese version of the Resolution Trust Co. us

In Asia, REITs are gaining popularity because both Singapore and Hong Kong have performed very well in recent years as recipients of real estate investors from markets such as China, the Philippines and Indonesia due in large part of central bank policy which target the U.S. dollar directly in the case of Hong Kong, or U.S. interest rate policy, in the case of Singapore.

REITs continue to attract investors because their dividends are more appealing than other investment opportunities in the curre