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Product Lifecycle Management in CIB: a real answer

Among the responses banking institutions have brought to the economic crisis, one thing of particular note is the establishment of client-driven structures to im prove marketability of the product.
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Reputation: Preserving the Essential

The fiery English novelist Jeanette Winterson elevates the safeguarding of one’s reputation to the status of a heroic duty: “It’s true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn’t they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?”
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Climate Change in Copenhagen: Received Ideas and Actual Stakes

Was the Copenhagen Conference the last chance to do something about climate change?

The fact that the Summit did not result in a concretely detailed, legally binding international treaty does not represent the failure that some have seen in it.
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The Copenhagen Accord: What It Tells Us

The international Copenhagen conference on climate change ended in the least ambitious result that anyone could have anticipated. It is not so much the fact that the “Copenhagen Accord”’ is a political declaration and, therefore, not binding that is really important.
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R.I.S.K.: A Project, an Event

R.I.S.K. is an initiative aimed at developing research and best practices with regard to risk. The recent crisis has highlighted the importance of much ongoing work and the need to reinvigorate ideas and practices concerning risk.

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Strategic Management of Liquidity Risk

Liquidity risk is at the heart of the banking industry. More generally, because it materializes at the level of the balance sheet, it provides a synthesis of the sum of risks a company faces. A structure dedicated to operational monitoring is indispensable, but its purview must be sufficiently expansive to contribute to the governance of the firm.

Towards Better Budget Management

Budgets are rarely respected. Pleasant or unpleasant surprises make budget revisions necessary. Good management practices require constant updates of budget planning, reflecting not only the most recent realized figures, but also the most up-to-date information available on the fundamentals of the business activity.

Two articles to facilitate management without getting caught up in excessive management control:

> Cash at Risk: Managing Liquidities
> Business Reporting Differentiating Exogenous Shocks and Performance

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Counterparty Risk Management: External or Internal Ratings?

If the bankruptcies of Lehmann Brothers and General Motors are evidence of the severity of the current economic climate, they are also signs of a new vulnerability against which few companies are immune.

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Compensation and Value Added

Trader compensation has been on the front pages this year. The issue was also part of last month's G20 agenda. The question is: What kind of compensation doesn't encourage excessive risk-taking?

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Weather Risk Management

Weather conditions affect the overall economy. Whereas catastrophic events (floods, storms, etc.) are managed via insurance systems, with indemnification of defined losses, normal meteorological variations can only be managed through organized and informed planning initiated by a company.

Liquidity risk management between systemic and prudential regulation

Today, building capacities to manage liquidity risk at the level of banking institutions is the main means of strengthening the prudential regulatory framework -- and by extension, to fostering systemic stability.

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Project Portfolio Management

These days everyone is constantly searching for cost-cutting opportunities, a necessity to preserve companies’ growth.
Cost control, strategic alignment, risk management and the involvement of business line managers have been recurring topics in the media these past few months.

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Transfer Pricing: Policies to Revisit

Transfer prices are the prices of goods, services, or intangible goods exchanged by the different national entities of the same corporation.

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Stressing the World

Only the future will tell us whether the stress test exercise that the banking sector has undertaken will prove to be relevant. Some critics have called it into question, even to the point of predicting the apocalypse.
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Managing Information Systems Risks : a Holistic View

While risk management is not a new activity for most companies, many still confine the development of Information Systems (IS) risk management to IT departments, due to the specificity and complexity of the decisions that need to be made.
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Revamping the economic model of Corporate and Investment Banks

The investment banking field today finds itself under pitiless scrutiny in a setting of emotions flailing between dark doom and indignant mistrust, and shrill calls for complete dismantling.
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TMS : Burden of choice or embarrassment of riches ?

The area of treasury management for global corporations has long been undergoing major growing pains: regulations have shaped the way treasury management must be done, instruments constantly evolve and the very area of a treasury manager’s responsibility multiplies.
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Carbon Finance

While climate change has been grabbing headlines for years, efforts to combat it have increasingly focused on the regulation and reduction of carbon emissions.
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Internal control: towards governance and risk control

Internal control has traditionally been seen as a curb to business development.
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