North American ERM/Solvency developments

The guys over the pond are having a busy week (actually two ponds for me, coming from the Isle of Man!), so worth summarising here.

RIMS Conference is underway over in Canada, and while I will need to wait before I go hoovering up material, the Risk Management Monitor dropped this curious piece out on top ERM mistakes - a little hard to substantiate some of the examples, but relevant nonetheless, in particular #5 on the difference between risk appetite and risk tolerance (lack of definition somewhat addressed in the IRM's release last week).

The Canadians, US and Bermudans got together for a group hug in the inaugural North American CRO Council. A very handy looking agenda to start with, particularly "industry leading" emerging risk research and 'harmonizing regulatory capital requirements across jurisdictions' - is this the promised "equivalence on a true outcomes-basis" as alluded to by Mr. Leonardi from the NAIC last month?

Last thing was the NACD Directorship roundtable on the new realities of risk management summarised here. Of particular interest was the attitudes noted, such as; which elements of risk oversight need to be addressed by the full board; need for specialist risk committees (not required outside of financial services); directors saying the are receiving more information on risk than ever before (quality a likely casualty I suspect); Risk managers said to be "less than optimally familiar" to the directors, and then some very generic comment on CRO's, risk and strategy alignment, risk appetite, material risk and risk culture.

My concern with this is that it sounds very much like the output from a lot of these round tables, where the 'risk rabbit' on good practices fills a gap where a more substantial discussion on defining terminology and responsibilities would be more useful.