Using racketeering law, which was designed to heavily punish criminal gangs, to convict school teachers and administrators raises an interesting question: Why haven’t other prosecutors used it in other fraud cases, for example, those involving the financial crisis and Great Recession?
On December 19, 2014 the Prudential Reporting Authority (PRA) published an update letter from the PRA’s Insurance Directors for all Solvency II-affected firms. The implementation date for Solvency II is set for January 2016. Insurers can now actively resume their efforts to become compliant with this long awaited regulation. Solvency II is aimed to establish…
One of the most inspiring insights of the INTEGRATED REPORTING (IR) framework is the set of guiding principles. This is the “magic” list, based on common sense, that we may use to evolve ourselves from strictly doing activities that “tick the box” to doing more exiting and added value ones. It’s not only improves our professional life but it is also a way to upgrade the personal life of our people.
Can we evolve the Finance job into an innovative activity? Yes we can.
Can we increase the number of corporate reporting users from just a few specialists to potentially everybody who is interested in our company? Yes we can.
Can we transform our financial statement from a boring encyclopedia into a business tool able to increase the value of our capitals? Yes we can.
Do you know the “Three Little Pigs” fable? If not, they were three anthropomorphic pigs that, after being sent out by their mother to seek their fortune, built three different houses with different materials. A big bad wolf was able to blow down two out of three houses made of wood and straw but was unable to destroy the last house made of bricks, so he first tried to trick the pig to come out by asking to meet him at various places and then finally tried to enter the house via the chimney where he fell into a cauldron of boiling water and retreated.
The banking industry has a reporting issue. The traditional systems that have been in place for years continue to serve their purpose, but are not designed for today’s banking reporting needs. Traditional Asset & Liabilities Management (ALM) systems are designed to do risk assessment for the institution and have a complete listing of the banks instruments, while some banks have a separate system for tracking the individual instruments. The General Ledgers (GL) have all the standard accounting information needed to run the business. When it comes time to do reporting, such as the Y-9C or Call Reporting, the finance department needs information from them ALL.
Best practice dictates that changes in technology should be aligned with, or at least accompany, changes in organisation. However, by being stated as best practice in itself, this may suggest that this is not always the case. Creating the capability to deliver the necessary reports and documents is posing more questions than answers in organisations…
If you are an analytics professional, then cloud analytics is in your future — if you’re not already doing it.
I’ve talked to lots of companies that claim that cloud analytics isn’t for them. But they’re wrong, not least because their marketing department is almost certainly already using some form of cloud analytics today (to track ads or social sentiment).
What will tip people towards using more cloud analytics?
The whole governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) category started out pretty much as a response to a variety of financial scandals, starting with the Enron debacle in 2001 and moving all the way through to Bear Stearns and Bernie Madoff in 2008.
Organizational cultures that lack candor, Ferrazzi Greenlight CEO Keith Farrazzi tells us, endure longer cycle times, slow decision-making, unnecessarily iterative discussions and below-average financial performance. Even worse, a lack of candor can dumb down a company’s risk intelligence and, in some cases, lead to catastrophe. In the January-February Harvard Business Review, Ferrazzi writes: “My team interviewed executives…