Thursday 26 June 2014

Risk Managers: What Is The Difference Between Risk Management Software VS Spread Sheets

All of us have been using spread sheets and off course we love them. Spread sheets are the ones that would help you analyses the budget of your family, create statistics on the production and the risk assessment process. Wait a second. What was that. Risk Management through Spread Sheets? I am sure some of us must be scratching our head asking how is that possible, where as others may be feeling shy looking away with a small amount of guilt churning in your stomach.
Reassured i am sure that you are not the first one to deal with spread sheets especially when it comes to risk management. Using risk management would help you learn the formulas, checking the cell links, ensuring proper formatting, and risking the human error in the certification auditing program. This is the main inspiration behind our risks management software offering one of the best solutions to the risk management process and not the spread sheets. 
 
The Use of Spreadsheet programs for a better risk management
Spreadsheet programs are considered to be the most essential part of the business and have been utilized for a variety of tasks world wide. The adaptability of these spread sheet programs have led to their use without considering the other solutions. They have been successful in offering features and attributes that have been beneficial for all the risk managers and are bounded with certain limitations.
  • A One Time Risk Assessment for Small Business Organizations: When smaller business organizations with limited operations need to complete and succeed in a single risk assessment, it would be proved to be beneficial when you complete risk assessment through a spreed sheet program. And in case of the assessment that has to be repeated the task tends to become tedious resulting in the users managing spread sheets as opposed to risk management.
  • No Purchase is required if a spread sheet is already owned by the business organization: Most of the business organizations have already purchased the spread sheet program utilizing the open source of the spreadsheet programs.
  • Documents been already shared and transferred between the computers: When business organizations have been having an enterprise version of a spreadsheet program, risk assessments would and can be easily emailed, and placed within the collaboration software allowing you to share it through out the business organizations.
  • A proper and a customizable format: Risk managers using the spread sheets program have a better option of customizing the major aspects of risk assessment starting from the calculations to the aesthetics.
Limitations of a Spreadsheet program:
  • Sharing out an un protected document: While sharing out the documents related to risk assessment, you run out the risks of edits and changes being made without any sort of the document owners consent. This would lead them to an un approved version of making its publication with a record of when and what changes were made.
  • Process of Calculation creation: While utilizing the spread sheets for the risk assessment program users here would have to create and do a proper research on risk calculations that need to be implemented. This could be a daunting task and a time consuming process. Also while implementing these calculations, the risks of utilizing the formulas that are not consistent enough through out their scope increases.
  • Repeatability: Risk management process is usually completed many times due to several reasons be it the auditing process or the improvement process. Spreadsheet risk assessment program cannot be set up to be easily repeatable. If the person in charge of the operational risk management process creates the risk assessments and leaves the organization due to a specific reason, then the method used would not be clear unless there is any proper documentation. And in case the document is not created with this assessment then this new assessment may not have to be created.
Risk assessment process can be a complicated process unless you use the right tool at the right place. Organizations here must identify and mitigate risks before they would occur to ensure us with a reliable service maintaining the organizations reputation. Not using an automated and a centralized tool organizations are fray enough and would connect to the risk variables at hand and distinguish the organizations overarching risk position.

Monday 2 June 2014

Best practices in Operational Risk Management

Businesses have become global and more organized in the present financial world together with the sophisticated of financial technology. Advancing technology has also invited complexity in the activities of the financial institutions and the level of risk across a firm.
Establishing best practices in Operational Risk Management includes the risks other than credit, interest rate and market risk can be substantial.
Some of the novel risks that have emerged for the financial institutions include:
Advanced technology:
Technology has to be applied to reduce the human errors arising from manual processing. However, too much dependency on technology sometimes may give rise to the system failure errors.
Data Security:
With the evolving cloud-based businesses (e-commerce), potential risks like internal and external fraud and system security issues have come up.
Proper Maintenance and Backup:
The financial institutions have evolved a leader as service providers. This calls for greater maintenance of high-grade internal controls and back-up systems.
According to the new Basel Capital Accord that was proposed in 2001 has stated Operational Risks as a distinct class of risk that of course, differs from credit risk and market risks. It is termed to be a significant contributor to any financial institution's risk profile. The regulation also suggested various approaches to assess the operational risk exposure for a financial institution. These approaches have however evolved over time and today the level of complexity under various approaches varies widely.
Below listed are some of the best possible practices that can be applied by any organization:
Organizations must have a thorough understanding of:
·         The place of Operational Risk Management (ORM) in the context of risk management.
·         The proper knowledge on the significant difference between Operational Risk Management and Operational Risk Measurement.
·         Best practices for the ORM.
·         Significance of operational risk in Governance, Risk and Compliance and Enterprise Risk Management frameworks.
·         The procedures and policies required to support ORM.

Often the ORM function in any financial institution forms a part of central risk function. Any organization can achieve the best possible protection against the negative impact of the potential risks and can achieve best growth opportunities with ORM.