A Proactive Approach to Risk Adjusted Performance Management

Banks need to assess their lending practices to get a clear view of how the financial climate, and emerging economic uncertainty, will impact their corporate clients and the growth and performance of their business.

To do that, they need to fully understand their exposure to interest-rate and liquidity risk, and proactively manage their balance sheets to maintain growth and enhance profitability. They need to analyze their lending practices, identifying sources of funding and qualifying loan targets to ensure proper loan management. All of this necessarily entails a re-evaluation of their internal systems’ ability to respond to changes that can impact balance-sheet risk and returns. And many banks have concluded that legacy point solutions are not up to demands from the risk and finance departments to model numerous business and risk scenarios.

For these banks, the solution is an overhaul: combining the modeling capabilities of asset and liability management systems with the governance and reach of planning systems and the analytical power of advanced business intelligence tools.

As part of this approach, banks no longer limit asset liability management to regulatory compliance. They are moving beyond compliance, toward creating business value though flexible scenario modeling for a holistic view of the risk factors impacting the future performance of the business.

To benefit from this kind of proactive approach to risk-adjusted profitability management, banks need to implement several key capabilities. These include methodologies and processes for interest-rate management and balance-sheet optimization for fast and efficient advanced scenario modeling. Banks also the analytical power to rapidly evaluate the results and options available to them. Finally, banks need to act on this analysis. This requires them to put in place the information tooling needed to enable frontline staff to execute the selected options, as well as processes and metrics that allow management to assess the impact of any given measure.

As they move toward a holistic risk-adjusted performance management platform, bankers should ask themselves the following questions:

• What factors are impacting earnings and liquidity within the changing environment?
• Is the bank incorporating input from market-facing staff related to growth, spreads and potential losses?
• Is the bank taking a credit hit? If so, how much?
• Is the bank managing based on its current balance-sheet composition, without considering future events? Is it counting on cash flows that might disappear?
• Are the bank’s system capable of handling different interest-rate scenarios, including high volatility and negative rates? Can the bank measure the impact of these scenarios on liquidity and earnings?
• Is the bank’s current asset liability management solution supporting decisions that will maximize stakeholder value?

Any solution should combine three key attributes. First is that it should include an asset/liability management system capable of quickly computing multiple scenarios from the bottom up. Second, the solution needs to include business analytical tools to compare and contrast the rapid reaction plans for prioritization and execution. And finally, it needs a risk-adjusted performance management (RAPM) tool to measure and manage the results.

Attempting to build a solution in-house with this breadth of capabilities can itself be a risky business. Banks often cobble together a fragmented solution, since legacy point systems are typically focused on addressing just one aspect or requirement. This approach lacks a comprehensive or holistic view of the bank’s true risk position. Indeed, manual processes based on spreadsheets of general ledger data may provide a current view of the business, but fail to model for unforeseen risks or changing behaviors. The result can be a disconnect between the bank’s view of the risks it faces and the true factors impacting the bank’s performance going forward.

On top of that, dealing with multiple systems and suppliers introduces its own risk into the situation, including miscommunication, lack of clarity over ownership of key functions and poor interoperability that can potentially disrupt work flows. The bank may need to maintain multiple project teams with various specializations and vendor points of contacts for multiple individual suppliers, introducing complexity and expense.

That’s why banks increasingly are turning toward a more integrated approach combining risk, compliance and analytics to meet the challenge of risk-adjusted performance management. Adopting a consolidated platform can give banks the consistency and agility to gain a true view of their risk situation. The result is a realistic, holistic view of the bank’s business trajectory, accessible and managed through a single point of contact, ensuring consistency of approach and operational efficiency.