The Development Center for Finance (DCF) successfully reintroduced its Risk Management Seminar this 2024 and was attended by 22 participants from different organizations and industries. It was held on May 11, 18, and 25, 2024, via Zoom.

Sir Lawrence Velasco opened the seminar by introducing various risk management concepts on Day 1. After defining risk and the different classifications, Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) was also thoroughly discussed. Aside from the ERM process, the discussion also delved into risk governance and culture and its importance in the whole risk management process, and it was closed with a discussion of risk monitoring and reporting, emphasizing that the risk process is not only the role of the risk department, but it also requires the active cooperation of the other departments in the firm.

On Day 2, Sir Diogenes Dy took over the seminar and discussed important concepts in managing market and financial risks. Under market risk, Sir Don discussed the major causes of adverse price movements that may cause losses and how to effectively manage them through derivatives like forwards and futures, swaps, and options. Under financial risk, credit and liquidity risks were highlighted and introduced the 5Cs of credit and credit scoring as important risk management tools.

During the last day, Sir Lawrence Velasco returned for the morning session to present regulatory risks and how to manage them. Sir Lawrence emphasized that regulatory risk has a lot of interplay with other aspects of a firm’s business, which makes it very critical.

Sir Art Cayanan closed the seminar during the afternoon session with the discussion of selected cases on local companies, which were taken from the Cases in Risk Management in the Philippines book. Participants were given a complimentary copy of the book for their participation in the seminar.

Some of the feedback from the participants about the 3-day seminar were as follows:

“The topics presented today were clearly and comprehensively discussed by Sir Law. It also helped that he provided concrete and actual examples during the discussion. Looking forward to the next session. I also like the music playlist played during break. :)”

“The manual provided contains almost a hundred slides but Sir Law was able to tackle everything and finish the discussion on time without compromising any of the topics and even had time for Q&A. Good job. Hope to learn more in the next sessions.”

“Sir Don’s topics were a bit technical; however, these were well explained so, I had an understanding even for those unfamiliar topics.”

“Sir Law clearly explained the topic on regulatory risks and presented relevant examples. Practical and informative! Thank you DCF!”

“Thank you, Sir Art, for walking us through the varied interesting cases. And showing us how to identify the risks and holding the magnifying lens for us to scrutinize the financials of companies to better understand the risks these companies are facing. Too bad not enough time to go over all the cases. Good choice of the cases.”

“Excellent and incisive discussion of the cases, Sir Art! I learned so much about risk analysis in a just one day.”