**7. Conclusions**

326 Risk Management – Current Issues and Challenges

**6.3. Vanguard tools and systems** 

One of The Bank's core principles is:

*"Technology drives Operations"* 

every risk

 in each Business line at all geographic markets

**6.5. Sustainable risk quality** 

**6.6. Objective decisions** 

measure risks at an acceptable confidence level.

**6.4. Integrated risk control and management** 

in an integrated way across the whole corporate structure:

Within the Risk Management arena, this translates into The Bank's keenness on the use of vanguard tools and systems. Having the right technology allows The Bank to analyze and

Risk must be identified, quantified and homogeneously managed according to a common magnitude (economic capital). The Bank tackles such risk control and management activities

In the last 20 years, The Bank has applied proprietary risk scoring methods to evaluate the risk of its customers and operations. Ensuring that The Bank does not incur risk over a pre-

Decisions taken must be objective, taking into account contrast of opinions and avoiding decision making being exclusively restricted to an individual. The Bank pursues man-

As the objective of this chapter is not to describe in detail each of the aforementioned risk management guidelines, the main takeaway is that it is indeed critical for a firm to have in place some sort of core principles aligning its strategic objectives with its risk management model. Which specific principles are best suited at each particular organization is an open

For instance, although a risk management model could prove to be extremely successful for a leading player, it does not imply that the implementation of such guidelines by another

In general, following industry best practices, lead to superior results than other techniques; nevertheless, the achievement of enhanced performance will only come by hand of ad-hoc

defined threshold, guarantees the sustainable development of its business.

community decisions over credit operations both in the sales and risk areas.

item that requires the organization an internal analysis.

competitor would prove the same degree of effectiveness.

and particularized risk management strategy.

This case study has outlined some reasons why Risk Management is important. Though the concept arised over a decade ago, the emergence of the economic crisis in 2008 has given thrust to organizations' adoption of risk management policies, specifically in the financial sector.

To date and during the downturn years we have evidenced common mistakes (the *"seven dreadful mistakes"*), that with the right risk management policies in place could have been avoided or at least ameliorated.

Nevertheless, in the midst of pessimism and underlying financial turmoil there is still room for hype and there are not only lessons to learn, but also quick wins that firms can put into practice to ease their recovery from the current situation.
