Description: The selection of the economic capital calculation approach becomes more of a modeling decision. Now let us pause here and think about the arbitrage-free assumption at the beginning. At any time, there can be only one price on any asset. If the company considers the price calculated above as the fair price for its products, then it must hold true that the same price has to be arrived at if the company uses a real-world pricing approach instead of a risk-neutral approach. This gives us a very good basis to calibrate the appro- priate economic capital.

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: Companies need to learn to plan for uncertainty by taking into consideration downturns, not just an environment of moderation and occasional booms.

Description: New column centered on enterprise risk management.

Description: Feature article discussing the IASB’s and FASB’s introduction of the use of other comprehensive income (OCI) to report certain changes in the value of insurance contracts.

Description: Feature article describing the different types of risk cultures companies can have.

Description: Is Risk/Return a sound tool for decision-making? No. It is not consistent, not objective, distorts decision and degrades governance. Why? What shall we do then?

Description: The costly, time-consuming and complicated process of enterprise risk management (ERM) can be improved in many companies and made less tedious for managers by using reasonable data and templates obtained from peer group entities. The models used to calculate economic capital (EC) often underestimate its value because they do not consider decision-maker perception about risk. We assume here that managers, as the decision-makers, have appropriate business understanding and they can provide substantial information about risk characteristics regarding all business processes. Therefore we are focused, in this paper, on collecting data from managers across the different businesses to derive the appropriate knowledge about risky events, the importance of particular types of risk, the relationship between the risk outcomes and the level of risk control in a particular industry. We conclude that the collected data has a high potential for use as a benc hmarking reference and analysis for improving ERM models for individual businesses.

Description: The Chairperson discusses risk appetite.

Description: This paper examines the potential impact of increasing negative commentary by social media users in multiple forums, which can erode the “reputation capital” of a utility. It also offers an approach for successfully addressing that risk and integrating social media risk management practices into existing utility enterprise risk management (ERM) programs.