Lepus

With the news that MF Global Holdings Ltd are filing for bankruptcy, Lepus conducted an industry-wide survey, receiving 351 responses, to gauge opinion on the potential repercussions. The findings of the survey are presented below.

Market / Credit Risk Dashboards

Since the financial crisis, several banks have reorganised the Risk Management department so that it can effectively serve as a second line of defence against the excesses of business lines. Part of this goal is to ensure that information on key risk metrics is available to all stakeholders at all times so that damage from a potential tail event can be punctually forestalled.

Risk Governance and Policy

Since the onset of the credit crisis, there have been a number of high profile failures in the financial services industry, which have exposed glaring shortcomings in the corporate governance framework at major banks. Previously, the governance framework at banks gave undue precedence to revenues and reward at the unfortunate expense of effective risk management procedures. Moreover, there was insufficient oversight of senior management by the Board and organisational structures were too complex, which further exacerbated an already substandard framework. Now, however, significant changes are being pursued by major banks to redefine this framework and accord greater authority to Risk Managers.

Group Market Risk Organisation

In recent times, pressure from stakeholders and regulators has highlighted the importance of enterprise risk management. Towards this end, several firms have embarked on major restructuring projects. Recent research conducted by Lepus across several industry leaders revealed that, at least within the Capital Markets division, these approaches have been pursued vigorously, but they also vary quite sharply. Whether this extends to the structure of Group Market Risk as well is a point of intrigue."

Data Virtualisation

The revolution of business information systems and their corresponding data stores has transformed how global organisations produce and use information. This has happened in three parallel realms: enterprise business applications, personal productivity and content applications, and the internet. With the emergence of holistic and semantic data integration technologies, innovative organisations have started to leverage the immediacy and relevance of unstructured and Web data. This has enabled the use of rich enterprise applications and processes, and in the reverse scenario, real-time data in edge-of-enterprise Web applications.