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PRACTICE
Discovery and disruption Risk managers are learning to balance complex risk areas with becoming better generalists, as delegates at IRM’s 10th annual Risk Leaders conference heard BY ARTHUR PIPER
“O
ver the past 25 years, being a generalist has become a more important skill for risk managers than being good at calculation,” Lakshmi Shyam-Sunder, vice president and World Bank group chief risk officer, told attendees at IRM’s 10th Risk Leaders conference – A decade of discovery and disruption – in London this November. While she had started her career at the bank focusing almost solely on market risk, nonfinancial risks now comprised the majority of her work. “The old tools are necessary, but far from enough to deal with geo-political risk,” she said. “Politics have preoccupied us more than I would have ever believed.” She said that there had been a dramatic increase in the levels of uncertainty. The decades-long relationship between monetary policy and the markets had broken down following the 2008 financial crisis – not least because of the proliferation of unusual financial instruments, such as quantitative easing, that had become more widespread. She said that has inverted traditional relationships. “The US Federal Reserve System (Fed) now reacts to markets,
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Borrowing levels in advanced countries is not sustainable
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