All about work (Financial Services, Markets, Information Risk Management, IT Audit, Advisory, Governance, Risk and Security) and life in general really.
Lehman Brothers’ 158-year old run came to a grinding halt this weekend. The biggest banking bankruptcy ever.
Perhaps this was long waited since 1999, when depression-era Glass-Steagall act was repealed? It all comes down to capital, size of balance sheet and reliance on wholesale markets for liquidity. See below for more details:
Lehman Brothers files for Bankruptcy (including European counterparties)
Excellent article in Harvard Business Review on secrets behind successful strategy execution. It is illustrated through a case study, whereby restructuring yeilds immediate results but the problems (or their symptoms) crept back in – until they decided to identify and address the root cause.
Focus should not be restructuring but rather identifying what and where it goes wrong – then appropriate change implementation and management as required.
See this link for the Executive Summary (I strongly recommend to subscribe to HBR for full article)
KPMG has released a whitepaper which leverages the insights and perspectives shared at a forum which brought together nine internal audit directors from leading financial institutions including Barclays, BMO Financial, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Bank of Nova Scotia, Morgan Stanley, Lloyds TSB, RBS and provided the opportunity for the group to identify key business drivers for change in today’s global financial services marketplace.
Key discussion points were around:
- Integrated Assurance Model
- Continuous Auditing and Technology
- Internal Audit’s Role
- Balancing Stakeholder Expectations
- Risk-Based Approach
- The Right People
The whitepaper here also highlights key action steps for Internal Audits to take to help meet expectations in 2010 and beyond.
FSA releases report on protection of consumer data within Financial Services industry. This review was carried out by FCID (Financial Crime and Intelligence Division) of FSA – In summary, it highlights the need for improvement in current practices deployed in the financial services industry for protecting consumer data. It also highlights and acknowledges a few good practices currently in place.
Main findings were around following themes:
- Governance
- Training and Awareness
- Staff recruitment and vetting
- Controls
- Physical Security
- Disposing of customer data
- Managing third-party suppliers; and
- Internal audit and compliance.
Click here for detailed report
Some really exciting statistics reported by Verizon Business RISK team.
It is worth to note the fact that although percentage-wise the insider data breaches are 18% compared to the external 73%, later in the report is is mentioned that impact of an insider breach is relatively a lot higher than of an external breach. Summary is below:
Who is behind data breaches?
73% resulted from external sources
18% were caused by insiders
39% implicated business partners
30% involved multiple parties
How do breaches occur?
62% were attributed to a significant error
59% resulted from hacking and intrusions
31% incorporated malicious code
22% exploited a vulnerability
15% were due to physical threats
What commonalities exist?
66% involved data the victim did not know was on the system
75% of breaches were not discovered by the victim
83% of attacks were not highly difficult
85% of breaches were the result of opportunistic attacks
87% were considered avoidable through reasonable controls
You can find the report here
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