At the SIA’s 2nd Annual Risk Management Conference for financial services firms held on June 27th in New York City, overall, the maturity of enterprise risk management in the past year has definitely moved up one notch. Uncertainty about how to define enterprise risk management and the debate about the value of risk management have been replaced with more practical concerns on how to best implement a risk management program and how to measure the performance.
For those of you who could not attend, the following are the hot topics to think about: 1) setting of risk tolerance or thresholds, 2) convergence of assessment work within risk, compliance, IT, and finance and audit functions, 3) centralization or decentralization of the risk management function, 4) bird flu impact on business continuity, 5) The need for technology audits, and 6) accelerated adoption of Enterprise Risk Management as a business necessity by credit rating agencies.
According to Julian Fry, Global Head of Operational Risk at Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., who was a panelist at the conference, the top 10 risk management business issues within Financial Services and Investment Management companies are:
1) Proper business practices, 2) Internal fraud, 3) Knowing your client, 4) Transaction execution, 5) Client selection exposure, 6) Business disruption, 7) Product complexity/pricing, 8) Employment practices, 9) Accounting evaluation (sox), and 10) Back office operations.
You can find downloads for a few of the presentations from the conference at:
risk conference presentations for download.
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