Discover the 7 Main Improvement Areas in Risk Management in the Coming Years

During this time of crisis I studied many documentsCurrently they are not yet well embedded as a
written by regulators, by big and small consultancymanagement concept. There will be a better
companies, I participated in different forums and Iappreciation that good communication and a learning
came to the conclusion that the following 7culture, with openness, lack of blame and analysis of
improvement areas will shape the future of Riskmistakes, is the key to effective risk management.
management in the coming years. These areas are:The idea of risk management being embedded in the
ERM or Enterprise risk management; data quality;culture of organisation is central in this context.
systems; business processes and organisation; moveArea 5: Move from quantitative to qualitative
from quantitative to qualitative measurement;measurement.
reporting requirements.One of the reasons of the current financial crisis was
Area 1: ERM implementation.cited as over reliance on quantitative approach. The
Many organisations are starting the implementation offuture measurements should combine efficient expert
their ERM program. This will require a complete newbased judgment, risk governance or proper
thinking. Instead of managing different types of riskarrangement of roles and responsibilities, stress
such as market risk, credit risk and operational risk astesting and holistic view of risks. In sound stress
separate silos, financial institutions are bringing themtesting, management judgment and imagination are
together under a single enterprise-wide framework. Itessential to determining the scope, likelihood and
will also require a shift from business line aggregationseverity of stress test scenarios. (See "Principles for
to risk type aggregation of risks and exposures.sound stress testing practices and supervision", Basel
Area 2: Data quality.Committee of banking Supervision).
High-quality master and reference data are central toArea 6: Strengthening of the reporting requirements.
the success of an enterprise risk- managementAuthorities and boards require relevant and timely
strategy. Each of the components of enterprise riskinformation concerning key risks that is captured by
requires different levels of data input. Otherthe risk reporting system to oversee the efficiency
important areas are workflow management andof the organisation's risk management approach.
event reporting.Area 7: Convergence of Market and Operational risk.
Area 3: Systems.Risk managers from different disciplines, especially
High-quality master and reference data are central tofrom market and operational risk are working
the success of an enterprise. In order to bettertogether to develop more forward-looking risk
manage risk, corporations need to bring togethermanagement approaches and techniques.
data from systems that in the past operated as silosMarket risk is by its nature very data-driven and
and have seemingly little or no relation to each other.already using the forward-looking tools such as
The main challenge in this area is to bring data fromscenario analysis and stress testing. In contrast to
different transactional systems, involving differentcredit risk, which is still mainly driven by historical
product lines and from different jurisdictions in such aquantitative data, Operational risk did not produce
way that data will remain relevant and consistentsufficient historical data. Instead, the Operational risk
without duplication or integrity loss.has focused on using business specialists' knowledge
Area 4: Business processes and organisation.and expertise to generate scenarios. These scenarios
There will be more discussion about 'risk appetite' andhave been applied together with the existing data to
'risk tolerance', which means a greater understandingproduce risk measurements or projections of risk
that companies need to look at their risk culture.probability and severity.