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The world is a complex and unpredictable place, and for businesses operating in an increasingly interconnected global landscape, geopolitical risk is no longer a distant rumble, but a constant storm...
April 26, 2024 | By Tom Thimot
For organizations cementing their approach to financing and managing the financial risk inherent in an M&A transaction, there are important capital markets and financial risk management actions to...
April 19, 2024 | By Amol Dhargalkar
Why do some banks take on too much risk? While there is no simple answer to this age-old question, human behavior certainly has had a big effect on risk-taking. Indeed, people are influenced by...
April 12, 2024 | By Clifford Rossi
A Gallup survey in June 2023 showed continuation of a long-term trend of “historically low faith” in U.S. institutions, with many of them “at or near rock bottom.” Confidence in big business came in...
March 8, 2024 | By L.A. Winokur
Assessment and reporting of cybersecurity incidents, long ingrained as risk-management and business-continuity imperatives, have gotten even closer scrutiny at companies subject to Securities and...
March 8, 2024 | By David Weldon
If the outcomes of stress tests are predictable, why go through the time and expense of executing such complex and rigorous exams? That’s the question du jour in the wake of the Federal Reserve’s...
March 1, 2024 | By Cristian deRitis
Dark patterns – deceptive user-interface design elements that subtly coerce users into making choices against their best interests – have emerged as a threat to privacy rights across company websites...
February 23, 2024 | By Kasey Pukys and Andy Soodek
The United Nations wants to maximize the opportunities created by artificial intelligence (AI) and minimize its risks. However, the suggestions made toward this end by the recently created UN AI...
February 16, 2024 | By Alessandro Mauro
For the ever-widening battle against money laundering and financial crime, new Corporate Transparency Act regulations are designed to shed light on illicit shell companies and other maneuvers,...
February 16, 2024 | By Jim Romeo
2023 undeniably etched its place in financial services history, a year marked by accelerating change and a precarious financial climate. It brought calamity in the form of largely unforeseen bank...
January 26, 2024 | By Stas Melnikov
Technology governance and risk management have long been tough subjects in corporate boardrooms predominantly populated by non-technologists. Artificial intelligence, and particularly the rocketing...
January 19, 2024 | By David Weldon
Banking crises bring reactions both regulatory – to ensure financial stability and prevent recurrences – and attitudinal. A recent multi-country historical study by Cornell University’s Matthew Baron...
January 5, 2024 | By Dawn Kissi
In mid-November, the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission revealed its financial tally from 784 enforcement actions during fiscal year 2023: $4.949 billion, second only to the $6.4 billion...
December 15, 2023 | By Jim Romeo
In the wake of recent bank failures, many long-standing notions about what constitutes safety and soundness in the financial industry have come under intense scrutiny. The failure of existing...
November 22, 2023 | By Alla Gil
Every time a bank collapses, we hear alarm bells about ineffective risk measurement and mitigation – and, inevitably, regulators respond by adopting stricter rules. Lamentably, though, regulations...
October 13, 2023 | By Clifford Rossi
The rapid failures of several regional banks this spring continue to reverberate across the market, casting a pall over the riskiness of this segment of the banking industry. Despite an unusual...
September 8, 2023 | By Clifford Rossi
When a financial institution fails and its postmortem is written, the focus inevitably turns to culture. For banks, beyond the corporate approach, risk culture is especially important. What does it...
August 18, 2023 | By Tod Ginnis
Risk managers are professionally inclined toward full honesty. After all, deception – whether intended for good or ill – is at the heart of many disasters. Telling people what they want to hear, or...
August 18, 2023 | By Aaron Brown
As chief risk officer since 2019, Senthil Kumar has helped guide BNY Mellon – America’s oldest bank and one of the global giants of investment servicing – through post-pandemic workplace changes,...
August 11, 2023 | By L.A. Winokur
In the 21st century, it seems as if the world has bounced from one financial disaster to the next, with the Great Recession, the European debt crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic among the fiascoes...
August 4, 2023 | By Tod Ginnis
For its 2023 Global Risks Report, the Word Economic Forum asked leaders across academia, business, government, the international community and civil society to rank a series of global risks according...
June 30, 2023 | By David Wheeler
As regulators, academics and financial institutions themselves seek answers about recent bank failures, and pontificate on management’s inefficiency in assessing risks in banks' balance sheets, the...
June 30, 2023 | By Alla Gil
What went wrong? The question was unavoidable from the moment in March when Silicon Valley Bank went down. It only grew more insistent with the subsequent failures of Signature Bank and First...
June 16, 2023 | By Jeffrey Kutler
All bank board members and executive committees should carefully read the Federal Reserve’s recent findings on Silicon Valley Bank. SVB’s governance and risk management practices came under fire in...
June 9, 2023 | By Clifford Rossi
Risk professionals need to break out of their narrow confines and recognize both the necessity and benefits of partnering with colleagues across their organizations. Recent bank failures have...
June 2, 2023 | By Cristian deRitis
I was a teenager in Uzbekistan when the Soviet Union collapsed. I recall panic and uncertainty. Empty store shelves. Shortages of basic necessities. Most vividly, I remember my grandmother’s tears...
June 2, 2023 | By Elena Shtern
Can corporate culture be quantified? “Spoiler alert,” Alison Cottrell admitted at the start of a presentation addressing that question last December. “Our answer will be no. But there are things you...
May 19, 2023 | By L.A. Winokur
Motivating risk managers can be challenging. At best, they do their jobs well, make all the right decisions, back up their work with solid analytics and reasonable assumptions and … drumroll …...
May 5, 2023 | By Cristian deRitis
How many more failures are needed before the banking industry realizes that a more proactive, hands-on approach to risk management is clearly needed? Are more fiascoes really necessary to demonstrate...
May 2, 2023 | By Clifford Rossi
Things had been thankfully quiet on the bank failure front before March 2023. Since aggressive lending backfired in epic fashion in 2007, toppling more than 500 American banks over the next...
April 28, 2023 | By Donald van Deventer
Global fines for banks that are failing to prevent financial crimes rose 50% in 2022, due to the tsunami of Russian and Belorusian sanctions, the Ukraine war, the economic downturn and the rise in...
April 21, 2023 | By Samar Pratt
In times of great volatility and uncertainty, there are no excuses for poor risk management. While there are plenty of risk culture and modeling success stories, tales of failure are the ones that...
April 21, 2023 | By John Thackeray
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank and fears of other falling dominoes sparked a firestorm of recriminations and investigations. The regulators whose rapid crisis response may have staved off the...
April 14, 2023 | By Jeffrey Kutler and L.A. Winokur
What lessons can we learn about the true nature of stress tests from the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank? There is at least some belief that these banks would have avoided...
March 24, 2023 | By Tony Hughes
Due diligence is long ingrained in the corporate world and particularly in banking and finance. Vetting of customers, business partners, investment prospects, and vendor and third-party relationships...
March 17, 2023 | By David Weldon
Wall Street banks have been hit with more than $2 billion in fines for using unauthorized communications channels – a number that may rise further as regulators clamp down on unmonitored and...
March 10, 2023 | By Rupal Patel
Many governance, risk and compliance (GRC) teams are being asked to find creative ways to do more with less and demonstrate more business value. This will force them into a difficult juggling act....
March 3, 2023 | By Robyn Marsi
Good written risk documentation is both an art and a science. In a perfect world, the writer and subject matter expert (SME) come together as one. Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfect world,...
February 17, 2023 | By John Thackeray
In financial markets rife with uncertainty and volatility, figuring out how to create and properly use a risk appetite statement (RAS) is a daunting task. The traditional process for addressing this...
February 17, 2023 | By Clifford Rossi
With M&A activity likely to increase this year, excellence in due diligence will be critical for sellers and in particular for acquirers. Yet there are at least two recent examples of due diligence...
February 10, 2023 | By Charles Wendel
How effective have Basel III reforms truly been? A December 2022 report by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) takes a self-congratulatory tone. However, while banks are certainly...
January 27, 2023 | By Marco Folpmers
With the Ukraine war, supply chain disruptions, rising interest rates and strong dollar, companies face unprecedented worldwide volatility. This environment is accelerating the need for treasury...
January 20, 2023 | By Greg Deveney and Johan Nystedt
In business we trust. According to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, business was the most trusted of four major institutions. Its 61% approval rating topped those of government, non-governmental...
December 16, 2022 | By L.A. Winokur
The stunning collapse of FTX is an age-old story of management hubris, excessive risk-taking and insufficient regulation and risk management. But the catastrophe has also given us more food for...
December 16, 2022 | By Clifford Rossi
A U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council report in October on digital-asset risks drew conclusions not unlike those that central bankers and regulators had been reaching even while cryptocurrency...
December 16, 2022 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Relative to the days when a singular lending officer would subjectively review applications to grant or deny credit, today’s algorithmic underwriting and credit scoring have helped to create a more...
December 9, 2022 | By Cristian deRitis
In 2016, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency opened an Office of Innovation. Banking capital and profits were riding high, due in part to reforms enforced after the 2008 financial crisis by...
December 2, 2022 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Identity verification and authentication are key to electronic commerce and the further digitalization of financial services and other businesses, and there are a host of available technology...
November 18, 2022 | By Jim Romeo
Within an asset management firm’s website may be a page that signals its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in ownership, leadership, employment and even investing practices. The...
October 14, 2022 | By Maurice Collada III
A recent Securities and Exchange Commission proceeding against a Georgia investment advisory firm and its chief compliance officer is prompting renewed concerns about the personal financial liability...
September 16, 2022 | By Jim Romeo
Coinbase Global, operator of the biggest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, went public in April 2021. It has been mostly rough going since. The company’s market valuation has plunged, from an initial $86...
August 12, 2022 | By David Weldon
Financial institutions have been attempting to move away from risk silos for years, but true, integrated enterprise risk management (ERM) remains a work in progress. Since some on the business side...
July 1, 2022 | By Tod Ginnis
When risk management veteran Clifford Rossi started out in the 1980s with a Cornell University PhD in Financial Economics and Quantitative Methods, his goal wasn’t to become a risk specialist per se,...
June 24, 2022 | By L.A. Winokur
Risk managers spend considerable time honing their skills in measuring and managing individual risks. Lamentably, far less attention has been given to understanding not only the interactions between...
June 17, 2022 | By Clifford Rossi
Regulators send insistent messages with a steady beat of anti-money laundering and financial crime enforcement actions. A few recent examples are USAA Federal Savings Bank’s $140 million in civil...
June 3, 2022 | By Jim Romeo
Our risk management frameworks have not advanced commensurate with the level and trajectory of risk over time. A new paradigm is therefore desperately needed. Take, for example, enterprise risk...
May 13, 2022 | By Clifford Rossi
Anchorage Digital Bank, which markets itself as “the first federally chartered digital asset bank,” has been ordered by the U.S. national bank regulator to correct anti-money laundering (AML)...
May 13, 2022 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Edward Jones chief risk officer Christopher Van Buren recently revealed that his biggest career lesson to date is that he “can be the difference.” It is something he said he didn’t have the...
May 6, 2022 | By L.A. Winokur
Historically, compliance and risk management have been viewed as critical functions, but not functions that proactively generate business value. Honeywell’s Amanda Sabates: Visualizing risks and...
April 29, 2022 | By Amanda Sabates
The race is on to be the most sought after financial super app, simplifying access to a full array of banking, credit and other services via mobile devices. Revolut, founded in London in 2015 as a...
April 22, 2022 | By Katherine Heires
Amanda (Mandy) Norton, who announced her retirement in January from Wells Fargo & Co. after serving more than three and a half years as chief risk officer, will be joining the Credit Suisse Group...
April 15, 2022 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Even as data management and technology skills are seen as increasingly essential for risk managers, observers of the profession and of recruiting trends say that longstanding analysis and...
April 15, 2022 | By John Hintze
For the last two years, it feels like we’ve lived in a state of ongoing crisis as unexpected global events have disrupted organizations in every part of the world. From a global pandemic and massive...
April 1, 2022 | By Bogdana Sardak
From consulting firms and think tanks to central banks and the International Monetary Fund, there is no shortage of documentation and data points on the perils of the world and, as categorized in the...
March 25, 2022 | By Jeffrey Kutler
The financial industry doesn’t need a crash course in anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regulations. They have been in place and evolving since the U.S. Bank...
March 25, 2022 | By Jim Romeo
The stepped-up economic sanctions against Russia and the sectors they target exacerbate the burdens and risks for businesses facing compliance obligations – tasks both facilitated and complicated by...
March 18, 2022 | By John Hintze
Some of us dream of Olympic glory. Others, of making it big by backing the next meme stock before it goes to the moon. For the past three decades or so, financial and corporate strategy teams have...
March 18, 2022 | By Alla Gil
It’s a paradox made more pronounced by the pandemic: People are a company’s greatest resource, and also its greatest risk. Start with all the buzz around the Great Resignation, which saw a record 4.5...
February 11, 2022 | By L.A. Winokur
2021 was a record year for cyber breaches, as reported by the Identity Theft Resource Center. With high-profile attacks hitting the headlines – from SolarWinds to Colonial Pipeline to CNA Financial,...
January 28, 2022 | By Lauren Kornutick
As we start a new year, it’s a natural time to reflect on the past as well as our future. The last two years have shown that we still live in a complex and uncertain world, despite all the advances...
January 14, 2022 | By Cristian deRitis
Public perception that financial institutions are driven by greed and willful blindness has recently been reinforced by a seemingly never-ending litany of scandals. This impression of failure is a...
December 17, 2021 | By John Thackeray
The U.S. Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and its anti-money laundering regulations have progressively expanded to apply to activities beyond cash and bank transfers, and the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020...
December 10, 2021 | By Jim Romeo
While rising to the challenges of 21st-century crises, chief risk officers have gained in prestige and C-suite positions. Rarely, however, do former CROs become chief executive officers, with...
December 3, 2021 | By L.A. Winokur
The global crisis of 2008, combined with academic work in behavioral economics, has sensitized the financial industry to the human element in catastrophic events. As MIT finance professor Andrew Lo...
November 19, 2021 | By Katherine Heires
Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from one that appeared on the website of law firm King & Spalding. The co-authors are partners Drew Hruska, Zack Harmon, Kyle Sheahen, Robert Dedman, Sumon...
November 5, 2021 | By King & Spalding
In the fragmented and multilayered architecture of U.S. financial regulation, one agency is arguably first among equals. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a Treasury Department bureau...
November 5, 2021 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Policymakers are working feverishly to bring some regulatory order to cryptocurrency markets, but it remains very much a work in progress. Approaches are being debated in legislative bodies, as well...
October 22, 2021 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Spyro Karetsos was hired as Google's chief compliance officer more than a year ago, but he has not yet actually gone to work - to the office, that is. In fact, everything from the interview process...
October 15, 2021 | By L.A. Winokur
Integrated (or holistic) surveillance has been a hot topic in the financial services industry for several years, because of the view that bringing together diverse data sets and analyzing them...
September 24, 2021 | By Matt Smith
Trust is arguably one of the most important brand assets in business. Every transaction is a promise made, and businesses must ensure they keep their promise to customers - such as delivering goods...
September 24, 2021 | By Michael Campbell
An often-repeated refrain on the topic of boardroom diversity is that it requires a trade-off: sacrificing quality to satisfy quotas. It doesn't have to be - and shouldn't be - that way. Take, for...
September 17, 2021 | By L.A. Winokur
At this time of hybrid working environments, in homes and increasingly back in offices, a prerequisite for an effective, productive organization is a culture of inclusivity and trust. A hybrid...
August 27, 2021 | By John Thackeray
A risk taxonomy and risk-rating scales are foundational components of enterprise risk management (ERM). The former gives a firm the ability to pinpoint all of its risks, while the latter allows...
August 26, 2021 | By Brenda Boultwood
A risk taxonomy and risk-rating scales are foundational components of enterprise risk management (ERM). The former gives a firm the ability to pinpoint all of its risks, while the latter allows...
August 20, 2021 | By Brenda Boultwood
To upend an old adage, it's the worst of times, with the world still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating health and economic consequences. And yet, it's perhaps the best of times...
August 13, 2021 | By L.A. Winokur
It's one thing for CEOs to be outspoken about business. It's their bailiwick. It's quite another when they speak out on social issues, opening themselves up to criticism that it is not directly...
July 16, 2021 | By L.A. Winokur
In Part I, I explored the concept of Enterprise Risk Management Maturity Models, and how they can be effectively used to identify an organization's current ERM capabilities across multiple...
July 16, 2021 | By David Fisher
Every firm needs a comprehensive enterprise risk management (ERM) strategy to identify, assess and manage risks consistently across critical business processes, in all business units. But true risk...
July 16, 2021 | By Brenda Boultwood
Behavioral and cognitive science, a mainstay in economics based on the work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and others, is wielding greater influence in various areas of risk management. A growing...
July 9, 2021 | By Katherine Heires
What does a critique of econometric analysis from the 1970s have to do with addressing climate risk today? Everything! Risk managers, forecasters and modelers need to keep the Lucas Critique top of...
July 9, 2021 | By Cristian deRitis
Gains in gender diversity, among other inequality issues getting high-level policy attention before COVID-19 struck, have been set back since. It is a harsh reality now being faced in India, one of...
July 2, 2021 | By Nupur Pavan Bang
I recently had the opportunity to speak with a senior executive at a large financial institution who was wondering aloud why he wasn't getting more value out of his investment in enterprise risk...
July 2, 2021 | By David Fisher
How much risk would you be willing to accept to meet your company's performance objectives, if you were a board member of a CRO? Moreover, what types of limits, if any, would you place on...
June 18, 2021 | By Brenda Boultwood
The Black Swan casts a long shadow. The concept illuminated in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, required reading in investment and risk management and various other disciplines, seemed to explain so...
June 18, 2021 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Last month, the European Central Bank published the results of its monumental TRIM project - a detailed five-year exercise to assess the internal models used by large banks to determine risk weights...
May 28, 2021 | By Tony Hughes
When the pandemic hit, we certainly sensed there would be a strong impact on our social lives. But what was not immediately apparent was the extent that Wall Street and its regulated financial...
May 21, 2021 | By Chris Wooten
Strong risk governance is about risk acknowledgement, accountability and clear mechanisms for risk-based escalations and delegations. Under a well-built governance framework, acknowledged risk-taking...
May 21, 2021 | By Brenda Boultwood
Jessica Wachter of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School has been named director of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Division of Economic and Risk Analysis (DERA), which provides...
May 14, 2021 | By Jeffrey Kutler
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) recently published an interesting framework for climate risk that includes helpful advice on how a financial institution can integrate climate...
May 14, 2021 | By Marco Folpmers
Facing super-low interest rates, an onslaught of regulatory developments and the emerging priority of climate risk, banks today are under tremendous pressure. However, despite current challenges,...
April 30, 2021 | By Peter Plochan
The recent SolarWinds incident served as a wake-up call: Having separate cybersecurity, supply chain, and enterprise risk management (ERM) disciplines and units within an organization is increasingly...
April 16, 2021 | By Marianne Bailey, Jason Dury and Kate Sylvis
Desperate COVID-19 times have called for desperate measures, and, as it turns out, a decent-sized dose of TLC. More than a year on, many companies and their executives continue operating in crisis...
April 16, 2021 | By L.A. Winokur
If business continuity is the immediate plan to ensure that a business is able to continue providing services and survive, then operational resilience is the larger strategy that business continuity...
April 9, 2021 | By David LaFalce
While COVID-19 continues to weigh on public health and the economy, signs of resolution are on the horizon. Though we remain focused on the pandemic, vigilance today does not preclude us from...
April 1, 2021 | By Cristian deRitis
An alarming 43% of board members in Europe believe that COVID-19 represents a fundamental threat to the survival of their organization. That's according to a Board Agenda-Mazars-INSEAD Leadership in...
March 26, 2021 | By Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding
For the largest banks, the Federal Reserve recently finalized rules that will impact stress tests, capital buffers, regulatory reporting and loss-absorbing capacity. In lieu of reporting certain...
March 19, 2021 | By Brenda Boultwood
By measures ranging from revenue and workforce growth to market valuation and mind share, Big Tech stands out in the corporate world. It is also at risk of paying a price for rampant success, if...
March 19, 2021 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Following a familiar pattern since he took office, President Joe Biden on February 24 issued executive orders to unwind actions taken by his predecessor. One of that day's revocations was a 2017...
March 5, 2021 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Even Silicon Valley has to face the music. Risk and regulatory pressures are rising for corporations everywhere, so it's not surprising to see some of the biggest names in tech taking steps to be...
February 12, 2021 | By L.A. Winokur
In May 2015, the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) cracked down on cryptocurrency company Ripple for anti-money-laundering lapses. The action was tone-setting in at least...
February 5, 2021 | By Jeffrey Kutler
As it does every year, the World Economic Forum identifies and analyzes a long list of threats and hazards - 35 to be exact - in its latest Global Risks Report. One of them stands apart from all the...
January 29, 2021 | By Katherine Heires
Simply put, the global shocks of 2020 were unmatched by any time in recent history. Not only did the COVID-19 pandemic reach a scale and longevity that rippled through the way organizations operate,...
January 22, 2021 | By Brian Molk
It's all things digital for financial services. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace and acceptance of change in financial services, and new methods of banking and managing risk will...
January 15, 2021 | By Brenda Boultwood
Risk experts say it's a sign of the times. Companies and other institutions have been finding themselves facing - or being forced to face, depending upon how one looks at it - a ramped up and long...
December 18, 2020 | By L.A. Winokur
The crisis of 2008 sensitized the financial industry and its regulators to threats to economic and systemic stability. Policy reforms, designed to prevent worst-case recurrences, were accompanied by...
December 11, 2020 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Amid challenges related to staff working from home, risk and compliance teams at trading firms need to up their game when it comes to conducting both trading and communications surveillance....
November 13, 2020 | By Katherine Heires
The FinCEN Files, a series of reports published in September by BuzzFeed News, criticized the anti-money-laundering efforts of global banks and shed some unflattering light on the system of...
November 6, 2020 | By Katherine Heires
Risk is the absence of information. There is risk in absolutely everything we do because we can't possibly know all there is to know. This is especially true in a pandemic. In a COVID-19 world, we...
October 30, 2020 | By David X Martin
Technology in risk and compliance has, to date, yielded limited success, even after many millions of dollars in investments. But, as more financial institutions adopt artificial intelligence (AI),...
October 16, 2020 | By Brenda Boultwood
In a 2015 report, The Power of Parity, McKinsey & Co. concluded that if women fully participated in the world economy, global GDP would increase $28 trillion by 2025. India alone could account for...
October 9, 2020 | By Sai Nitya Bodavala and Nupur Pavan Bang
The pandemic is all over the news and on everybody's mind. This is especially true of risk managers. It is top of mind as we assess and set priorities in view of increased cyber attacks associated...
September 11, 2020 | By David X Martin
Risk management folks aren't known for being touchy-feely types. But these days, many are mindful of the moment, as companies take stock of their risk management programs and protocols and prepare...
September 4, 2020 | By L.A. Winokur
While continuing efforts to dispel regulatory clouds lingering from the sales-practices scandal that came to light in 2016, Wells Fargo & Co. has adopted a risk management structure that places chief...
August 21, 2020 | By Jeffrey Kutler
“I thought I had seen it all,” recalled Paul Fabara, chief risk officer at Visa, referring to previous financial crises that have taken place during his decades-long career at other credit card and...
July 24, 2020 | By L.A. Winokur
June 25 was a busy day for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Its open meeting resulted in approvals of two final rules, withdrawal of a previously proposed rule and supplemental proposal, and...
July 10, 2020 | By Jeffrey Kutler
In September 2019, Paul D. Fabara became executive vice president and chief risk officer of Visa. Over the previous eight years he held several senior positions at American Express Co., including...
July 2, 2020 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Modeling climate risk, and analyzing your risk of default, is extremely difficult - particularly if you are an electricity provider. All one has to do to realize the enormity of this challenge, and...
June 26, 2020 | By Tony Hughes
For years, environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors have been a priority among institutional investors. COVID-19 has underscored the significance of the 'S' risk, as the public health and...
June 19, 2020 | By John Hintze
Brenda Boultwood Many of us grew up thinking of all the places we could go and the problems we could solve, a la the main character in Harold's purple crayon. Harold's special crayon allowed him to...
June 12, 2020 | By Brenda Boultwood
When the workforce began to pivot to new work-from-home or other, varied offsite environments, virtually no area within a financial institution went unaffected by the shifts. Nearly everyone had to...
June 8, 2020 | By Ted Sausen
More than 30 U.S. states have decriminalized or legalized marijuana. Many of them declared cannabis products to be “essential,” allowing them to be dispensed during pandemic lockdowns, preserving...
May 29, 2020 | By Ted Knutson
Whether in good times or bad, risk-taking is how companies generate earnings. In times of crisis, the effectiveness of response determines an organization's agility and resilience. If corporate...
May 15, 2020 | By Brenda Boultwood
As we surpass 60 days since the first 100 COVID-19 infections were confirmed in the United States, states and local municipalities are debating how and at what pace to reopen their economies. Some...
May 15, 2020 | By Cristian deRitis
Like many multinationals, packaged-foods giant General Mills relies heavily on sustainable freshwater supplies. It needs neither too much nor too little, and of sufficient quality - a Goldilocks...
May 8, 2020 | By John Engen
When the time comes to judge who knew what, and how early, about the coronavirus pandemic, and whether public health alarms were too late, there need be no blame or shame at the World Economic Forum....
May 8, 2020 | By Ted Knutson
Crises labeled as unprecedented catastrophes create unnerving anxiety. Suddenly, issues that seem abstract in everyday life become critical, with no definitive answers: How bad will it get? Whose...
May 1, 2020 | By Karamjeet Paul
Times get tough, life eventually settles to a new normal and we plow on. It's now time to rethink how we should work, rather than continue to navigate within the old construct. Looking ahead, in the...
April 17, 2020 | By Brenda Boultwood
The coronavirus pandemic has set off a wave of financial and operational disruption - as in the case of remote work arrangements - causing sudden shifts in risk exposures and mitigation measures....
April 3, 2020 | By Katherine Heires
Brian Brooks, a prominent spokesman for the cryptocurrency industry on policy and regulatory matters, has been named first deputy Comptroller of the Currency. The Office of the Comptroller of the...
March 27, 2020 | By Jeffrey Kutler
William Isaac, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and of Fifth Third Bancorp, and Howard Milstein, a prominent New York banker and real estate developer, have formed a strategic...
March 27, 2020 | By Ted Knutson
A former chief operational risk officer of U.S. Bank, the principal subsidiary of Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp, has been assessed a $450,000 civil money penalty for shortfalls in Bank Secrecy Act...
March 13, 2020 | By Ted Knutson and Jeffrey Kutler
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. Treasury agency that spearheads efforts to combat money laundering and other illicit uses of the financial system, has appointed its first digital...
March 13, 2020 | By Ted Knutson
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Financial Research (OFR) has introduced Bank Systemic Risk Monitor (BSRM), an interactive tool for monitoring key banking industry metrics in an accessible,...
March 6, 2020 | By Katherine Heires
[Editor's Note: We would like to welcome Thomas Day, the co-owner and vice-chairman of ShortFin Capital Management and TBA LLC, as our new FRM Corner columnist. Thomas has a wealth of financial...
March 6, 2020 | By Thomas Day
Many firms recognize that climate financial risk is a complex, far-reaching risk with unknown systemic consequences that could affect all parts of their portfolio. However, they are grappling with...
February 28, 2020 | By Maxine Nelson
Although financial crime has existed for as long as money has been around, it continues to beset financial institutions. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime estimates that as much as $2...
February 21, 2020 | By Jason Somrak
Market data company CryptoCompare maintains a ranking of cryptocurrency exchanges according to what it terms “a clear methodology to assess risk.” Released on February 12, the latest iteration of the...
February 21, 2020 | By Ted Knutson and Jeffrey Kutler
Many organizations now have a chief data officer or “data czar(ina).” Organizations increasingly want to be data driven, and change company culture to value data in the same way they would, say,...
February 14, 2020 | By Brenda Boultwood
For the first time in the 15 years of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report surveys, the five highest-ranking risks in likelihood over a 10-year horizon are environmental: extreme weather,...
February 7, 2020 | By Katherine Heires
Fueled by global demand and rising revenue, fast-growing providers of risk and compliance services and technology are building up their senior executive ranks. As announced in January, Vatsa...
January 31, 2020 | By Jeffrey Kutler
It is neither new nor uncommon for U.S. financial regulators to maintain dialogue with constituencies that they supervise and other interested parties through committee structures. The Commodity...
January 24, 2020 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Corporate executives are contending with so many potential risks that, depending on fast-changing economic and market developments, some have to take priority over others. Among those bubbling to the...
January 17, 2020 | By Katherine Heires
What do chemists and accountants have in common? Surprisingly, quite a lot. They are both data analysts and researchers whose core function is to manipulate and experiment with substances to produce...
January 17, 2020 | By Peter Hughes
New technologies have broadened and sped up the communication and analysis of data, changing the nature of risks that companies face and how to mitigate them. Banks, for example, have long tended to...
January 10, 2020 | By John Hintze
Climate change and income inequality are issues usually associated with progressive political agendas and denied or demurred on the conservative side. Aparna Mathur, resident scholar at the...
January 10, 2020 | By Ted Knutson
Brenda Boultwood On the heels of ushering in a new decade, it makes sense to reflect on not only how far we've come but also where we are headed. While risk management is perhaps not completely...
January 10, 2020 | By Brenda Boultwood
If a company wants to minimize the effects of risk on its capital and earnings, reputation and shareholder value, it must implement a comprehensive enterprise risk management (ERM) program. A...
January 3, 2020 | By John Thackeray
Recent scandals involving Australian and UK banks leave little doubt that we must design integrated enterprise risk management (ERM) approaches that weave “common sense” into decision-making. When...
December 20, 2019 | By Brenda Boultwood
We intuitively understand accounting measures such as profit or equity. The corporate world places great reliance on them. For example, they are used to communicate and evaluate a firm's financial...
December 13, 2019 | By Peter Hughes
Unprepared, unaware, confused, bewildered - these are reactions we regularly encounter when discussing compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act's (HIPAA) Privacy and...
December 6, 2019 | By Teresa Wilkins and Chris Isaacs
More than a year and a half since the European Commission published its Action Plan on Financing Sustainable Growth, an EU official told a financial industry gathering in Washington, D.C., that he is...
November 27, 2019 | By Ted Knutson
Financial firms' communications compliance may never have been entirely easy. But the explosion of mobile technology, social media, chat and collaboration platforms raises to new levels not just the...
November 22, 2019 | By Ted Knutson
Sanctions have become increasingly frequent and nuanced to meet current political and economic realities. They are imposed, lifted and modified regularly, often within a few days' or weeks' time, due...
November 22, 2019 | By Charles Delingpole
Organizations are always going to have to grapple with change - whether it's in the form of a major corporate shakeup, sweeping adoption of transformative digital technologies or shifting industry...
November 22, 2019 | By Peter Bannister
Alex J. Pollock has been named principal deputy director of the Office of Financial Research, a U.S. Treasury Department unit that principally supports the multi-agency Financial Stability Oversight...
November 15, 2019 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Since the issue of climate change stress testing burst onto the radar screen, I've become a little obsessed by Hurricane Katrina. That event, in 2005, not only caused widespread human suffering and...
November 15, 2019 | By Tony Hughes
Contrary to the current contemporary narrative around climate change, from a risk manager's perspective, the scientific and political argument around climate change is now over. Governments and...
November 1, 2019 | By David Kelly
[Editor's Note: This month, GARP is transitioning from Cliff Rossi to Brenda Boultwood as our CRO Outlook columnist. We'd like to thank Cliff for all of his thought-provoking contributions, and also...
October 18, 2019 | By Brenda Boultwood
Cybersecurity, geopolitics, third-party relationships, social media and reputational threats factor into a fast-changing, increasingly complex risk landscape, as revealed in the Kroll Global Fraud...
October 18, 2019 | By Katherine Heires
While resiliency has always been a cornerstone of risk management in financial services, the focus has shifted considerably over the past two decades, from an emphasis on business continuity and...
October 4, 2019 | By Andrew Gray
With the financial consequences of climate change increasingly capturing boardroom attention, and under the spotlight of Climate Week events coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly...
October 1, 2019 | By Katherine Heires
Having had a front-row seat to the excesses of the boom that fueled the financial crisis of 2008-2009, I've been asked over the years what suggestions I have for current and future risk managers in...
September 27, 2019 | By Clifford Rossi
The version of capitalism that has dominated global markets for the last half century is being rightfully questioned as never before. Whilst over a billion people have been pulled out of poverty over...
September 27, 2019 | By Bertrand Piccard
That the world is warming is increasingly undeniable, and by all observations and credible scientific projections, the consequences of this warming will grow more far-reaching and disruptive to our...
September 27, 2019 | By Stacy Swann and Alan Miller
A decade since the financial crisis began to subside, “the system is basically OK,” Andy Agathangelou says. But it still “needs to be fixed.” Agathangelou in 2015 formed the Transparency Task Force...
September 27, 2019 | By Ted Knutson
Global temperature change ranks No. 1 on a list of 15 extreme risks compiled by the Thinking Ahead Institute (TAI). The institute, a not-for-profit outgrowth of Willis Towers Watson Investments'...
September 24, 2019 | By Ted Knutson
Executive appointments announced on successive September days reflect continuing steady demand for legal and compliance expertise - along with a bit of a twist in the proverbial revolving door...
September 20, 2019 | By Jeffrey Kutler
With total assets under management now in excess of $3 trillion, private equity has grown from a cottage industry into a substantial percentage of the global capital markets. With maturity comes...
September 13, 2019 | By Steve Wiesner
The Bank Policy Institute (BPI), an association representing the biggest U.S. banks, is suggesting that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau “lead an effort” to modernize and coordinate...
September 13, 2019 | By Ted Knutson
Institutional investors have historically made their collective voices heard through organizations such as the Council of Institutional Investors and International Corporate Governance Network. Now...
September 6, 2019 | By Katherine Heires
Senior management “cannot anticipate every problem,” Jacob Rosengarten points out. That is where a well-functioning corporate culture, relying on the observations and actions of “people who are...
August 23, 2019 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Financial institutions and other companies are facing major challenges in gearing up for state privacy laws taking effect across the U.S. - and not just the most prominent of them, the California...
August 23, 2019 | By John Hintze
To assess how rapidly the field of risk management - and the skills required of risk professionals - are changing, Frank Roncey looks through the lens of data. “The way we understand data, the way we...
August 16, 2019 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Interviewed on a recent Intercontinental Exchange podcast, Hester Peirce of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said that contrary to what people in the cryptocurrency community may believe,...
August 16, 2019 | By Jeffrey Kutler
Financial industry executives continually bemoan - often without precisely disclosing - the high costs of compliance, which has stimulated interest and investment in automated solutions, particularly...
August 16, 2019 | By Ted Knutson
The conservatorships of government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - one of the last major unresolved matters of the financial crisis - have recently received heightened...
August 16, 2019 | By Clifford Rossi
The presidential nominee of the European Commission recently endorsed the idea of creating a European bank focused on climate change, and the European Union is trying to figure out how to eliminate...
August 9, 2019 | By Robert Sales
Like other central bankers and regulatory officials who had a front-row seat on the financial crisis and contributed to the recovery efforts that followed, William C. Dudley took certain lessons from...
July 26, 2019 | By Jeffrey Kutler
In today's world, it's becoming impossible to ignore the rapid shifts taking place in relation to the environment, society and corporate governance. Business models are evolving, as are the wide...
July 26, 2019 | By Robert B. Hirth and Rodney Irwin
While economists and market pundits remain divided on whether a recession is coming or not, it is worth investigating how policymakers would react if it were it to happen. In the past, a combination...
July 3, 2019 | By Sidharth Kamani and Julien Demeulemeester
In his victory speech on May 23, 2019, India's newly re-elected prime minister, Narendra Modi, said that “from now on, India will only have two castes: the poor and those that want to remove...
June 28, 2019 | By Sai Nitya Bodavala and Nupur Pavan Bang
The treatment of climate risk at financial institutions has changed significantly over the past five years. Whereas it used to be viewed mostly as a reputational risk that could be addressed through...
June 28, 2019 | By Jo Paisley and Maxine Nelson
The Institute of Internal Auditors has opened a public comment period on proposed updates of the risk management and control model known as the three lines of defense. A milestone in a year-long...
June 21, 2019 | By Jeffrey Kutler
It is well within the reach of companies to make the effort to ensure that there are more women in leadership positions, and that those who are receive sufficient support to flourish at their jobs....
June 14, 2019 | By Sai Nitya Bodavala and Nupur Pavan Bang
Since 2016, when the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority and the Monetary Authority of Singapore launched sandboxes for financial technology startups, regulators in dozens of countries have gone the...
June 14, 2019 | By Ted Knutson
For risk modelers at lending institutions, climate change represents an enormous challenge. Until now, stress testing has focused on acute short- and medium-term recession risk and has avoided...
June 7, 2019 | By Tony Hughes
On May 9, 2019, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued guidance on the Application of FinCEN's Regulations to Certain Business Models Involving Convertible Virtual Currencies. While the...
June 7, 2019 | By Ted Sausen
“Climate risk may adversely affect the balance sheets of financial institutions and therefore may be relevant for financial stability, in particular if markets are not pricing the related risks...
June 7, 2019 | By Katherine Heires
Before stepping down from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, where he served for eight years, Daniel Tarullo had some parting shots. Four months before his April 2017 departure, as the Obama...
May 24, 2019 | By Ted Knutson and Jeffrey Kutler
From fintech to vendor risk, and from cloud computing to risk management talent, the issues on Beth Dugan's mind reflect a broad swath of emerging and evolving challenges for both regulators and the...
May 17, 2019 | By Ted Knutson
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