CAL reiterates importance of risk management best practices for emerging markets

• nInternationally-renowned risk consultant David Roden in town

Capital Alliance, a full-service investment bank will focus on highlighting to the industry this week on best practices in risk management for emerging markets. Concentrating on the industry’s financial institutions, CAL along with David Roden will spend two days in Sri Lanka, meeting with senior bank executives including other representatives from the country’s financial community.

Roden is the CEO and Principal of Independent Global Research Ltd, a specialist research firm serving over 50 of the world’s largest special situation hedge funds from its London head office. Roden also consults to Southeast Asia central banks and leading lenders on their risk management policy issues, risk control programmes, and staff training requirements, prior to which he was the Global Head of Equity Derivatives at BZW (now Barclays Capital) where he was in overall charge of derivatives sales, trading and research and for the risk management of trading positions.

Roden was appointed by the Bank of England as chairman of the committee responsible for the merger of the London Traded Options and Futures markets in 1992, and was Deputy Chairman of the London Traded Options Clearing Members Committee, which was responsible for setting and monitoring capital adequacy standards for the London Traded Options Market. For the past 10 years Roden has split his time between London and Singapore, and has acted as a consultant for a number of banks and financial institutions in the region.

“David possesses a unique combination of real world experience with theoretical knowledge, which I am sure the industry will benefit from immensely. Risk management is both an art and a science, and it is imperative that the industry gains from David’s experience of building and advising on Risk Management infrastructure in financial institutions. This will provide a valuable insight into the steps needed to implement an effective Risk Management infrastructure,” said Ajith Fernando, MD/CEO, Capital Alliance Holdings

The financial crisis of 2008-09 showed us that even the world’s largest and most sophisticated financial institutions incompletely understood the various market, credit and operational risk factors they faced. The result was a global recession and the near collapse of the US banking system. Clearly the stakes are high, and to that end the Central Bank of Sri Lanka has issued a comprehensive set of guidelines governing risk management in the domestic market environment. Implementation of these mandatory changes is proving to be difficult, expensive and time consuming.

Financial institutions with a robust risk management practice are better equipped to navigate volatile markets and capitalise on opportunities that arise during uncertain times.