Enterprise Risk Management – Page 4

Hedging Risk In Real Estate

Neal Elkin of PIonline.com writes in A Better Way To Hedge Risk In Real Estate: “What if institutional investors, while increasing their allocations to both residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities, had been able to hedge their exposure to the underlying collateral?”

The author looks at some of real estate based indexes tracking U.S. property prices and the new derivaties that allow for hedging risks. Perhaps we will see this real estate derivates market become more active as a result of the current market conditions?

The Corporate Risk Management Library

Here are my notes from this webinar from Compliance Week, sponsored by CA, Inc.: Enhancing the Risk Profile of Your Organization: The Corporate Risk Management Library

Speakers:
Tom McHale, Vice President of Product Management, CA
Christopher Fox, Principal Consultant, Governance Compliance and Risk Group, CA

We are seeing a movement from executive autonomy to executive accountability and corporate secrecy to corporate transparency.

We are seeing an evolution in risk management. We need to identify the strategic risks. We also need to figure out how to get ourselves assured that we are addressing all risks. We are in a changing and diverse environment with government investments, stimulus packages, new regulations and new issues.

A “risk library” is comprehensive set of risks for specific categories, with a representation of the scope of risks for an organization, used by enterprise risk management processes. One key is to have an agreed upon classification (or taxonomy) across the organization.

In searching for a risk library where can you start? These are some references:

Federal Sentencing Guidelines
OCEG Redbook
COSO
Federal Reserve Guidance
CobIT 4.1
Federal Reserve URSIT
ISO 27002
EPA Legislations
Basel II
SEC listing requirements
Australian Standard 4360

The requirements of a risk library should have a holistic view. Financial risk is only one dimension. You want to also include strategic and tactical risk.

They moved onto examples of a risk library structure.

They set level 1 as internal risk and external risk. Level 2 was broken down into governance, operations, technology, compliance, financial, reporting, environment, international, market and social trends. Then they showed a third level of risk below the level 2 risk of governance. then they show a level 4 of various market conditions such as demographics, employment, labor relations and exchange rates.

Once you have the corporate risk management library, you decide which risks you can manage. After selecting those to manage you need to report on the risks, set up a compliance program, create policies and procedures, assess the risks and create an action program.

Standard & Poor’s To Begin Evaluating Enterprise Risk Analysis

On May 7, 2008, Standard and Poor’s Announced that they address enterprise risk management at part of their ratings: Standard & Poor’s To Apply Enterprise Risk Analysis To Corporate Ratings. (.pdf)

Ultimately, we will enhance transparency by providing investors and issuers our views of a management team’s ability to understand, articulate, and successfully manage risk. The benefits of the ERM enhancement will be to make the process of forming our rating opinions more forward looking, achieve finer differentiation among ratings, and facilitate construction of “what if” forecast scenarios.

S &P will look toward a company’s adoption of the COSO standards or the AS/NZS 4360 standards. But S&P will not make them a prerequisite for enterprise risk management nor sufficient evidence of sufficient risk manangement.