News
NEW Webinar: The Challenge - Linking ERM to Governance 22, July 2010 10 am ET (3 pm GMT)
Linking Enterprise Risk Management to Governance is one of the most significant global challenges that businesses face today. We will discuss some of the issues of consolidating risk information across an enterprise and presenting management ways to identify, measure, monitor and manage risks proactively while linking to performance objectives. We will illustrate sample risk and compliance capabilities, scorecards, dashboards and reports.
Date: 22, July 2010
Time: 10 am ET (3 pm GMT)
Duration: 1 hour
Sign up here http://gw.vtrenz.net/?Q0W3K1B3MA=clicksrc:SwordWeb
Improving risk governance throughout the organization Swords Mike MacDonagh joins a live panel discussion with Op Risk & Regulations
Corporate governance is a hot topic with financial regulators and legislators world-wide who are pushing for tighter rules they hope will prevent future crises and help make regulation more effective. Their main objective is to remedy the perceived failure of financial institutions to apply appropriate and effective corporate governance and controls across key business areas and to put an end to practices and a culture that encouraged excessive risk taking. In the wake of the crisis, a raft of proposals and recommendations followed and there is more to come from the European Union, the US, the UK, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and other national supervisors. The number and scope of these proposals and the uncertainty about what comes next poses some tough challenges for banks.
Financial institutions simply can't afford not to improve their risk governance and reporting frameworks - they would be risking regulatory and shareholder wrath, as well as potentially their firm's solvency in these demanding times. A webinar recently hosted by Operational Risk & Regulation and sponsored by SAP and ARC Logics focused on how financial services firms are gearing up to confront these challenges head-on.
The panelists include John Whittaker, Group Head of Operational Risk, Barclays Bank; John Thirlwell, Rapporteur, Institute of Operational Risk's practice guidance on operational risk governance and culture, and a co-author of 'Mastering Operational Risk'; Andy Hirst, Senior Director of Industry Marketing, SAP BusinessObjects; and Mike MacDonagh, ERM Product Manager, Sword, ARC Logics.
The recording can be accessed using the same registration link: http://mediazone.brighttalk.com/event/Oprisk/c24fe9f765-3825-intro
Sword at OpRisk Europe 2010 June 30th - July 1st Jumeirah Carlton Tower, London
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, will be attending OpRisk Europe 2010. The comprehensive agenda for 2010 will include discussions on the outlook for Basel II implementation and possible new enhancements to the current regulatory framework, how to ensure transparent and accurate reporting to line and senior management, as well as practical steps that operational risk managers need to take now to strengthen their existing risk frameworks against future market crises.
Sword product Director Richard Pike will give a presentation
Topic: Linking Operational Risk Management to performance How can a firm use scenarios to connect risk management to business strategy An integrated scorecard for risk and performance The ROI: Time to decision.
[Back to Top]Sword ranks highly in Operational Risk and Regulation Survey 2010 Download the report today
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business has once again ranked highly in the Operational Risk and Regualtion Survey for 2010 for its product Sword. This year’s OR&R software survey shows that not only is operational risk management expanding way beyond its initial remit, but governance, risk and compliance is also establishing itself as a firm favourite among those looking to weather recent market adversity through integration.
According to Richard Pike, Chief Product Strategist for ARC Logics “Regulators are asking not just that op risk record the data, but that it demonstrates the business people know where their problems are and that they are doing something about them”
The full report can be downloaded here
[Back to Top]How are insurers doing in their preparation for Solvency II? Mike MacDonagh discusses
They aren’t ready yet but there’s still some time to go. Having said that, many of the insurers we are working with are well advanced in their Solvency II preparations. Insurers appear (sensibly) to be taking a stepwise approach to Solvency II
Step 1: Appoint a programme manager and plan the project.
Step 2: Focus on Pillar 1 and the data and processes for calculating capital requirement.
Step 3: Focus on Pillar 2 and the ERM and ORSA requirements
Step 4: Focus on the reporting requirements of Pillar 3.
Read more at http://www.cchsword.com/blog/?p=30
[Back to Top]Solvency II - good Governance opportunity or Compliance problem? Sword Blog
Nobody doubts the importance of Solvency II to the insurance industry in Europe but will it achieve what it is setting out to with regard to good governance? The question is a bit broad so, more specifically, will Solvency II really result in insurers linking their capital calculations to their risk appetite and, through the ORSA, to their risk management frameworks? Also, will they really consolidate the different risk silos into an enterprise risk management framework that will increase the risk awareness of executive management and enable risk-based decision making?
Read more at our Sword Blog
[Back to Top]Complimentary Webinar 29, April 2010: ISO31000 - Using ERM to Chart a Safe Passage in Dangerous Waters Is your Organization heading for the Iceberg or navigating safely?
Exploring how ISO31000 can be used as a guide to implement enterprise risk management processes and principles.
Date: 29, April 2010 Time: 10:00 AM EST
Location: Web and Teleconference
Register at our events page
[Back to Top]ORIC Reports Continuing Membership Growth
The Operational Risk Consortium (ORIC), run by the ABI, is continuing to expand its customer base with three new subscribers joining its unique database of operational loss events in insurance in the first quarter of 2010.
ORIC’s powerful reporting and graphical tools help members visualise risks, analyse trends and predict loss outcomes. Its database is used to benchmark individual firms relative to the whole industry or selected peer groups. ORIC’s data can also be used for more sophisticated statistical analysis such as internal modelling of operational risk under the Solvency II Directive.
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business is the technology platform provider for ORIC. Sword provides a uniquely flexible approach to loss recording, coupled with comprehensive reporting capabilities. Read the latest ORIC release here or contact Sword for more information.
[Back to Top]Sword Webinar - 31 March 2010 Outcome-Based Regulation…Global Compliance
Outcome-Based Regulation: Being Prepared for the Next Phase of Global Compliance
Major shifts in the global regulatory environment raise new governance and risk challenges for company leaders. Outcome-based regulation offers businesses many advantages and raises new challenges on adopting best practices towards enterprise governance and risk-driven disciplines.
Date: 31, March 2010
Time: 11:00 – 12:00 pm ET
Speaker: Richard Pike, Product Director, ARC Logics | Sword
Register here - all attendees receive a complementary white paper
[Back to Top]ORIC Guide to Scenario Analysis A guide to sound practices
This Guide characterises top priority scenarios for operational risk in the insurance industry and provides best practice guidance for their likelihood and impact assessment. It brings together the views and thinking of leading insurers in the Operational Risk Consortium (ORIC) to help firms around the world manage their operational risk exposures more effectively. This is the first comprehensive industry-wide benchmark for operational hazards against which a firm’s approach to scenarios can be compared, and should therefore be of great importance to insurers as well as regulators. It is available on the ORIC website
Sword are OpRisk Technology Partners to ORIC
[Back to Top]Sword is part of ARC Logics ARC Logics is a Wolters Kluwer business unit addressing audit, risk and compliance
Announcement - Sword is part of ARC Logics 17 February 2010
On February 17, 2009, Wolters Kluwer announced the creation of a new business unit, ARC Logics that includes Axentis, Sword and CCH® TeamMate product lines. The new unit will help organizations across multiple industries address increasingly complex audit, risk and compliance challenges. As a combined business unit, ARC Logics is currently serving more than 1,800 customers and over 350,000 users in over 100 countries. The company’s customers span all industries, including: life sciences, healthcare, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, energy and government.
Read the Press Release
Visit ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business Website
[Back to Top]Sword Butler Technology Audit 29 January 2009
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, is a risk management solution that records risks, controls, and responsibilities throughout an organisation. It provides users with repositories of information about activities and processes within the organisation, the risks associated with them, and the steps that can be taken to mitigate these risks. Many risks are associated with compliance, and organisations often do not understand which regulations they need to comply with or what their duties are in order to comply.
Organisations often use spreadsheets to maintain a list of risks and how they should be addressed, which are error prone and difficult to manage. One of the strengths of Sword is that it can be supplied pre-populated with a range of content, such as risk and control libraries, categories, metrics, and thresholds, targeted at specific vertical industries, functions, and regulations.
Click for download information
[Back to Top]Sword voted top enterprise-wide risk management vendor in 2009 Risk Magazine Technology Rankings January 1st, 2010
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, was again voted top operatonal risk management vendor in the latest Risk Technology Rankings from Risk magazine. Sword topped the poll for Operational risk management – risk control and self assessment, key risk indicators and internal loss management and Operational risk management – capital calculation improving on their 2008 position.
Risk polled thousands of banks, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies and corporate treasurers for this year’s technology rankings, and received 2,437 valid responses. Respondents were asked to vote for the technology vendors that provide the best product offering across a number of categories, including enterprise risk management, risk capital calculation, front- to back-office trading systems, and pricing and analytics.
Participants were asked to base their votes on functionality, usability, performance, return on investment and reliability. Nominated technology companies were awarded three points for a first-choice vote, two for a second- choice vote and one point for a third-choice vote. Only technology end-users were allowed to vote. Risk conducted a comprehensive due diligence process and disqualified any votes that were felt to be unfair.
Download the report from our website
[Back to Top]Managing Emerging Risks January 21st, 2010
Dan Wallace talks about the importance of and methods employed in Managing Emerging Risks in our CCH Sword Blog www.cchsword.com/blog
[Back to Top]The FSA get serious about Stress Testing December 15th, 2009
www.cchsword.com/blog
As part of a recent announcement on the importance of Stress Testing, Paul Sharma, FSA director of prudential policy, said: “Stress and scenario testing should be an important element in firms’ planning and risk management processes. These changes send a clear signal to firms’ senior management that they need to engage in building a robust stress testing infrastructure as an important part of effective risk management, and use that to assess capital needs in a stress.”
This will force financial institutions to use scenarios to model risk and then to stress those scenarios. It also implies that they will need to take a quantitative approach to measuring the risk in scenarios. As if this isn’t enough, the announcement goes on to say that it expects firms to carry out “simultaneous system-wide stress testing”. That means having a common set of scenarios that are assessed across the enterprise and then compared and aggregated.
Right now, the majority of financial insitutions who are doing scenario analysis are using spreadsheets and this is clearly going to have to change. In partnership with some of our clients in insurance who are preparing for Solvency II and the Swiss Solvency Test, we have built a Scenario Analysis module in Sword that supports exactly what the FSA is asking for. Users create a set of scenario templates, determining what information is captured and what measures are required for each scenario. These can then be assigned to each of the relevant parts of the organisation for assessment and their status monitored. Once assessments are complete, the results can be used to analyse and stress the scenarios. Importantly, scenarios can draw on the data in the underlying risk framework, linking risk assessment, mitigation and losses to scenarios automatically, to inform and improve their assessment.
Scenario analysis and stress testing is an important step towards reducing risk in the financial institutions and I believe that, if the FSA supervise this initiative robustly, it will have a very positive effect.
[Back to Top]ISO 31000 - it's in the defintion December 10th, 2009
www.cchsword.com/blog
What is different about ISO31000 is more or less encapsulated in its definition of risk as; “The effect of uncertainty on objectives”. Firstly,risk; ISO31000 is unashamedly risk-based rather than control-based (as, e.g. COSO or COBIT) and this, in turn, makes it an approach rather than a prescription, unlike control-based standards. Secondly, there is ISO31000’s insistence that risk is measured in terms of its effect onobjectives. Why is this important? Because without the need for pages of additional text it reinforces ISO31000 as a corporate governance standard.
If the definition of objectives is correct and complete and the risks to them are understood, effective governance becomes possible. Finally, effect is a neutral term that includes the upside of uncertainty as well as the downside.
It isn’t simply about stopping bad things from happening but implies quantitative measurement of positives and negatives and, hence, risk-based decision making.
The progenitors of ISO31000 have clearly thought hard about the definition of risk and this is one of the reasons why I am happy to join the crowd who are lauding it.
Sword, part of ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, is an acknowledged world leader in operat
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Sword is the Enterprise Risk Management tool of choice for many of the world's most renowned blue-ch
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