Clash of Titans
In the wake of the financial crisis, the two Titans that create accounting standards tried to hammer out agreement over how to account for impairment of loans. These bodies are the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). “FASB and IASB share the same goal but unfortunately were not able to agree on the same standard,” said Emil Lopez, Director of Risk Measurement at Moody’s Analytics. FASB calls their impairment standard “current expected credit losses” (CECL) whereas IASB deals with impairment and expected losses in their International Financial Reporting Standards as IFRS 9. Lopez was […]
Move Beyond Spreadsheets
Is your firm ready? Financial institutions are seeking answers that will help them plan a roadmap for implementation of the new current expected credit losses (CECL) standard issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). “The runway looks long but firms need to start to prepare now,” said Anna Krayn, Team Lead for Impairment, Capital Planning and Stress Testing at Moody’s Analytics. She was the second of three panellists at the webinar “The Long Road to CECL” sponsored by the Global Association of Risk Professionals on September 8, 2016. “Now is the time to educate, organize and govern, quantify, and […]
Long Road, Many Challenges
Nothing like a financial crisis to show the rough spots in estimation of losses. “Credit losses weren’t being recognized on a timely basis,” and the impairment accounting models were complex and varied widely, according to Kevin Guckian, Partner, National Professional Practice at Ernst &Young. He was the first of three panellists at the webinar “The Long Road to CECL” sponsored by the Global Association of Risk Professionals on September 8, 2016. “FASB’s final standard should accelerate recognition of credit losses,” Guckian noted, referring to the current expected credit losses (CECL) standard newly adopted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. He […]
Avoid Jekyll and Hyde
Accurate price determination for commodities means that data must be gathered, processed and analyzed. What, then, are current best practices for data management? “Organizations are beginning to recognize their current solutions are no longer meeting current needs,” said Michal Peliwo, Vice President of Business Solutions at ZE PowerGroup. He was the third and final speaker at a webinar on August 24, 2016, sponsored by the Global Association of Risk Professionals, titled “The Price is Right? Strategies for Market Discovery & Optimum Pricing Challenges.” Peliwo described the fragmented world of data management as it exists at most companies. “MS Excel is […]
Optimum Price a Moving Target
How was risk-taking originally priced, and has this changed over time? Centuries ago, mercantile economies used to pool risk for the trading ships that were sent out. Over time, this “big chunk risk” has given way to increasingly more precise ways of determining risk, and is now down to individual financial transactions. “Pricing is the centre of gravity of this operation,” said Robin Bloor, Chief Analyst at The Bloor Group. “For every product theoretically there is an optimum price.” Beginning with this historical comparison, he was the first of three speakers at a webinar on August 24, 2016, sponsored by […]
Data Science 2. The Roadmap
“The core concept for data science is hypothesis testing,” said Nima Safaian, team lead for Trading Analytics at Cenovus Energy. The data scientist must identify trends, generate hypotheses, and test, test test. The scientist’s bent toward hypothesis testing should be even stronger than their math skills. Safaian was speaking at the Data Science webinar on August 2, 2016, sponsored by the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). “Attitude is everything,” Safaian said. “Think like a startup. Have an agile mindset,” he urged, referring to the books The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and The Lean Enterprise by Humble, Molesky, and […]
Data Science 1. Trading Analytics
At the end of the day, what do you produce? If you are a knowledge worker, your “product” could be something as intangible and significant as decisions. That is the thinking behind the “decision factories” discussed in Roger Martin’s seminal Harvard Business Review article. If we labour in decision factories, then we are decision engineers, and our chief raw material is data, according to Nima Safaian, team lead for Trading Analytics at Cenovus Energy. “We need the capacity to produce many good decisions,” he said at the webinar on August 2, 2016, sponsored by the Global Association of Risk Professionals […]
Catch a Falling Knife. Part 1
Who is taking advantage of the downturn in crude oil prices? “Most E&P assets are no longer economic to drill at today’s commodity prices,” said Curtis Flood, Vice President at the investment banking firm Evercore. He was the first of two speakers at a webinar “Catch a Falling Knife: Financial Repercussions of Current Crude Oil Prices” sponsored by the Global Association of Risk Professionals on June 7, 2016. (E&P refers to exploration & production, also known as the upstream petroleum industry.) The downturn in oil & gas prices is “the result of simple economics” caused by the “shale revolution” leading […]
Mega-Platforms, Mega Risk
There’s a world of difference between innovation and disruption. “Think of innovation as doing more, in the same old way,” said Haydn Shaughnessy, innovation specialist and author of Platform Disruption Wave: How the Platform Economy is Changing the World. He presented a GARP webinar on “The Rise of Mega-Platforms and the Risks to Banking” on May 25, 2016. In the first part of his talk, he described mega-platforms. He referred to the thesis of The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton Christensen. This book argues that successful companies get so caught up in meeting […]
The Dawn of the Mega-Platform
Disruption of the financial sector is just on the horizon, says Haydn Shaughnessy, author and innovation specialist. He presented a webinar on “The Rise of Mega-Platforms and the Risks to Banking” to the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) on May 25, 2016. His books include The Elastic Enterprise, Shift, and (most recently) Platform Disruption Wave. “What are the consequences of the disintegration of industry structures?” Shaughnessy asked. Most people see innovation as trying to get more of something that’s desirable, he said, but they might not understand clearly where they are headed. In short, what is the “big picture” […]