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January 23, 2012

New Co-Regional Director to lead the DC Chapter

PRMIA announces today the appointment of Steven Lee as the new Co-Regional Director of the Washington DC Chapter.

In his many previous roles, including his current position as the Managing Director of Global Client Consulting, he has worked extensively with major financial institutions in the United States and across the Asia-Pacific region (Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan) including some of the largest and prestigious global and regional financial institutions. His experience includes implementing governance, technology & operational risk solutions, information security and internal controls across various lines of business such as Consumer Banking, Treasury, Asset Management, Private Banking and Securities Brokerage business operations and technology processes. He led risk identification, assessment and implementation of internal controls at several large global financial institutions and corporates, covering business front office, middle, back office and technology processes, and across multiple locations in the Asia-Pacific region and the US. He also designed and implemented a continuous controls monitoring and risk indicators reporting program for a large bank’s operations across the Asia-Pacific region. Steven also developed and directed implementation of bank wide information security, crisis management, contingency planning and business continuity program covering front, middle, back-office and technology operations for a top global bank for its regional operations in Asia.

Steven Lee will replace Christopher Laursen as the Co-Regional Director of the DC Chapter, and will serve alongside Thomas Day. As chapter leader, he and the DC Steering Committee plan to encourage risk professionals and regulators to engage each other on common challenges. They hope to create a platform for active dialogue and engagement among members and the industry across a wide range of risk agendas. Many of these are highly challenging and still need much clarity to support effective implementation in our respective environments: boards, management, front office, middle office, back office, as well as covering global & cross-border considerations, regulatory challenges, dealing pro-actively with incentive structure dislocations and misalignments. He feels that PRMIA events, education, continuing learning, newsletters, and many other avenues provided should center around raising the bar, to bring to our members what is truly beneficial towards their advancement and careers as regulators and risk professionals. They hope to mobilize and energize our members to engage actively PRMIA and each other, using PRMIA as the platform towards these objectives.

PRMIA would like to acknowledge the Steering Committee members of the DC chapter, who will help the chapter achieve its goals. Please find the members below:

• Marlon Attiken, IBM
• Oluwaseyi Awoga, Consultant
• Paul Bond, Paul Bond and Company
• Jim Embersit, Ernst & Young
• Pamela Gogol, FHFA
• David Green, Angel Oak Capital
• Ashtish Gupta, Fannie Mae
• Nicholas Kiritz, Constellation Energy
• Keith Ligon, FDIC
• Kennan Low, UBS Financial Services Inc.
• Timothy McDonald, Boston Private Bank & Trust Company
• Weihua Ni, Analyst
• Tim Prindle, Ofice of Thrift Supervision
• John Schwitz, Defense Intelligence Agency
• Lindsay Steedman, Federal Reserve Board
• Kevin Stemp, Office of Financial Stability

Posted by kristinlucas at 04:21 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2012

RISKJOURNAL - A QUARTERLY PUBLICATION OF PRMIA DC

Welcome to the Winter January 2012 issue of PRMIA DC's newsletter.
(Click here to view our Winter January 2012 issue)

We have just seen the close of 2011, a year which perplexes most of us who try to make sense of world events and global markets. Major world events seem to occur at will, and virus-like with far higher frequencies and in quick succession than could be expected from historical data. Many rare and extreme events just sprout out, and some of these include:

The Japan earthquake and tsunami that devastated lives and properties, raised risks of nuclear leaks and disrupted global supply chains,
The Arab-spring and middle-east uprising culminating in the fall of long established regimes - from Egypt to Libya,
The social unrest in the UK, one of the worst in decades, and the global Occupy movement that underly social frustrations from failing economies,
The soaring of sovereign debts of major OECD countries to unsustainable levels and the spate of policy accommodations and central bank easing actions to keep the economies going.

And the list goes on. The world seemed a different place all of a sudden. Global markets across the board had sustained volatility not seen in a long time, and behaving in ways that defy predictions of most. Banks, asset management firms, hedge funds and other financial institutions trying to understand market gyrations were in many instances making guess work, which are often just as good as yours and mine.

What we have seen in 2011 is rising “uncertainty”, in the sense of Frank Knight’s distinction between risk versus uncertainty. With the culmination of events and the after effects - leadership changes in the middle-east, North Korea, and many key events set to occur like major elections in the US and Russia, the degree of “uncertainty” which we will see in 2012 will likely be no less dramatic than what we have witnessed in 2011. We can expect a highly eventful 2012 that will keep us, as risk practitioners busy on many fronts. Understanding the ramifications of potential events alone will be a challenging task. There are many others which we have discussed briefly in previous issues.

For one, the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act will start realizing sweeping changes across the financial services industry here in the US and will ripple across to financial centers in the Atlantic and the Pacific. In this issue, we bring to you a number of interesting articles to help shed more insights on issues highlighted above. Uncertainty is more dangerous than risk articulates well the important distinction of uncertainty versus risk and the implications for us in risk management. Knowing what we can see on the horizon, 2012 indeed looks like yet another year of living dangerously. The continuing Eurozone debt crisis and democracy deficit shows the cracks of an economic union without a meaningful political union exacerbated by the removal of the currency devaluation safety-valve. We have provided some references and links in our RiskResources column on Eurozone and Sovereign Risks that you might find helpful.

There is constant debate on what caused the 2008 financial crisis, one of which is the whole question of systemic risk. We have included one perspective in the article Magical Thinking: The Latest Regulation from the FSOC which argues the presumption of interconnectedness should be challenged.

We received requests for more hands-on and technical articles that would be helpful to risk practitioners. In this issue, we included articles on Managing Liquidity Risk in the Age of Basel III, Fair Valuing Illiquid Assets, and A Method of Measuring Risk Appetite. To help us stay abreast of developments in the regulatory front, we continue to highlight some recent proposed and finalized rules in our RiskRegulations.

This is probably something you noticed first. We have adopted a new format for our publication for the New Year. We hope you will like the new format and find it more user friendly and readable. We welcome your feedback and suggestions that you might have so we can continue to improve. Finally, we would like to thank many who made this possible, especially to all our contributors for sharing their thoughts through our RiskJournal. Enjoy the RiskJournal as we brace ourselves for the ride through 2012.

Steven Lee, Global Client Consulting
Editor RiskJournal
Deputy Regional Director, PRMIA DC

Posted by neil222966 at 05:51 PM | Comments (0)