Description: Many top-performing businesses aren’t just risk aware, but rather risk intelligent. Such a posture helps prepare companies for a major event and can demonstrate to a regulator or auditor that an appropriately strong control framework is in place. Better still, companies gain real strategic value from a “risk adjusted” understanding not only of their threats and vulnerabilities, but also the upside opportunities associated with various risks. It starts with having both qualitative and quantitative information to identify, assess and manage risks. Strategic risk management, at its core, is about creating value by increasing transparency and accountability, and quality of information. More than a mere compliance exercise, effective risk management enables more informed strategic decision making, increased accountability and transparency, a greater likelihood of organizational success, and – ultimately – competitive advantage, as borne out by many studies that correlate risk management and financial results.

Description: Discussion of how non actuaries are taking on many of the enterprise risk management roles of insurance companies. Discusses changes actuaries need to make to re-assert their roles. Also discusses roles actuaries can play in enterprise risk management outside of the insurance and pension industries

Description: The author suggests ways to strengthen a company's enterprise risk management process, including the development of an "effective resilience factor," a risk metric that reflects an organization’s exposure and response to an adverse event, and measures the ability of the organization to mitigate the reduction in its operating level.

Description: ERM and Investment strategies for healthcare companies

Description: Feature article discussing potential pitfalls of using leveraged short ETFs as inverse funds to hedge portfolios.

Description: Risk management theory prescribes a few legitimate reasons for management to hedge corporate revenues and reduce income volatility. In this paper we will use the oil tanker industry to illustrate some of these strategic considerations and how management can account for them in their decisions regarding whether and how much to hedge. Further work is needed to incorporate these considerations into a broader theoretical framework. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Regularization, by means of trading restrictions, is an effective way to obtain sparse replicating portfolios. By including only the most relevant replicating instruments, the resulting portfolio is more efficient computationally, easier to interpret, and better able to approximate the liability on an out-of-sample basis. The instruments selected depend largely on their respective trading costs. This paper evaluates a number of alternative methods for specifying trading costs. We find that trading costs based on simple statistics of the instrument and liability cash flows are an effective choice in practice. Presented at 2010 Enterprise Risk Management Symposium, Society of Actuaries, April 12-15, 2010.

Description: Risk management and capital budgeting are two critical components of the corporate decision process. They often need to be considered jointly at the corporate level because of their natural interaction through the dependent risk exposures and other synergetic relationships within an intricate corporate structure in a dynamic business environment. . This paper develops an integrated framework that aligns these two important corporate strategies across business divisions to optimize the streamlined enterprise strategic goal in a multi-period setting. The proposed integrated framework can serve as a practical guideline for corporate executives to optimally coordinate capital budgeting and risk management at the enterprise level.

Description: We demonstrate an integrated enterprise risk management (ERM) solution to optimize the risk portfolio, identify natural hedges, create an optimal risk treatment plan, enhance risk culture, and facilitate risk reporting throughout the organization.

Description: For most of the last forty years, corporate defined benefit pension plan assets have been managed to balance risk versus reward in more or less the same way that a risk averse individual would do with his own portfolio. Recently liability cognizant strategies have been developed, but these also attempt to balance risks and rewards. But pension plans are not individuals; they, much like their widely-held corporate sponsors, are pass-through institutions. The economics of such entities are found in the corporate finance literature rather than in the literature of portfolio choice. The corporate finance (and thus the pension finance) objective is economic value added rather than return for risk. Enterprise risk management is a corporate finance activity too and its goal should also be value added rather than return for risk. The intersection of enterprise risk management and pension finance leads to a value-based discipline with two startling results: • Widely-held corporations can increase shareholder value by hedging away their own systematic risk (e.g., CAPM β). • Very many corporate defined benefit pension plans should define their liabilities and manage their assets to develop a net short equity exposure (negative β).