Whitepaper
Payments
Risk management and operational
resilience in payment transactions
The importance of electronic payments has increased rapidly in recent years. The reasons for this are technological innovations, advancing digitalization and modernization of the market infrastructure. For banks, the processing of account and card payment transactions therefore represents a core value chain and an important business segment.
The position paper highlights the challenges that banks currently face in payment traffic. To this end, the Round Table conducted a survey among FIRM member institutions, surveyed the status quo, and developed important internal and external recommendations for action.
Authors: Dr. Markus Ampenberger (BCG), Prof. Dr. Tobias Berg (Goethe University), Daniel Regending (Deutsche Bank)

Macroeconomics
Bracing for Impact: Analysis of the
Current
State of the Banking Industry
Uncertainty remains high following the recent bank failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Credit Suisse. Is there a danger of a renewed crisis? The risk should not be underestimated, write the authors of the current FIRM position paper. According to their assessment, however, the banks are better prepared than in the financial crisis of 2007/2008.
FIRM CEO Gerold Grasshoff, together with co-author Dr. Til Bünder (BCG), has spent the last few months intensively studying the developments on the
Banking market busy. “You have to go way back to understand the context in which current developments are taking place,” Grasshoff explains. The banking sector has been fed with cheap money over the past 15 years, through low interest rates over a very long period and through quantitative easing.
Authors: Gerold Grasshoff (FIRM) and Dr. Til Bünder (BCG)

Asset Management
Cryptoassets
Crypto assets have had a difficult year. After hitting record highs in November 2021 and a market capitalization of $3 trillion, the end of quantitative easing also marked the end of the highs in the crypto market. The collapse of the crypto exchange FTX provided another low point. Many of the events in recent months are reminiscent of the dotcom bubble at the beginning of the millennium. This makes it all the more important to take a close look at the opportunities and risks of this asset class.
In past meetings, the Asset Management Round Table has taken a closer look at the various facets of the crypto market. The discussion panels showed that both asset management practitioners and experts from business and academia continue to see huge potential in blockchain technology. However, it is expected that the crypto world will undergo drastic changes
– both at the regulatory and monetary level.
Authors: Christoph Wronka, Jens Paulsen and Nils-Philipp Böhm (all Deloitte)

Risk culture
Perspectives on the supervisory focus and the lived practice in the institutes
A robust risk culture is a success factor as part of corporate culture and good corporate governance – many banks recognized this early on. At the latest with the regulators’ preoccupation with this topic and the consequent
inclusion of explicit requirements in the CRR and other regulatory documents, the topic has become widespread in the industry.
Leadership culture (“tone from the top”), responsibilities, effective communication and critical dialogue, and incentives: these core building blocks of risk culture are now established as a theoretical construct. The “Risk Culture” working group of the Frankfurt Institute for Risk Management and Regulation (FIRM) has derived ten theses from this.

Risk appetite
Frameworks for Non-Financial Risks: Status Quo and Priorities for Action in the Banking Sector
Proactive monitoring of financial risk positions, including quantitative management of risk provisioning, is a central component of the regulatory capital adequacy requirement and is therefore standard in banking. The development of the credit risk of a loan portfolio, for example, is monitored along quantitative target corridors and forecast on an ongoing basis. Where necessary, forward-looking risk provisioning measures are initiated to keep the Bank’s anticipated risk exposure within the target corridor.
Conceivable risk provisioning measures may include the acquisition of credit derivatives, the sale of non-performing loans, or even the reduction of new lending business, for example for certain customer segments.
Professional Articles
Sustainable corporate orientation in the context of risk governance
The concept of success, which used to be one-dimensional and focused only on economic performance, has changed to a three-dimensional concept of success that also reflects ecological and social success (triple bottom line).
Authors: Prof. Dr. Arnd Wiedemann and Yanik Bröhl

The Difference-of-Differences Approach: An Application Example in Risk Management
This article highlights the difference-in-differences approach as one way in which econometric techniques can be used to estimate the credit risk of financial institutions.
Authors: Dr. Guido Golla and Dr. Alexander Mosthaf

Disruption in the banking industry: advisors and customers benefit from AI
Recent leaps in development in the field of artificial intelligence will fundamentally change banks. Industry experts see high disruptive potential in applications like ChatGPT. The institutions are well positioned for a more aggressive digitization of their business models.
Authors: Michael Heck and Dr. Stefan Hirschmann

TCFD 2022 Status Report
Is there sustained progress in climate-related reporting? This question is addressed in the current technical paper and refers to the TCFD Status Report 2022. The task force signals a positive development for the last years.
Authors: Prof. Dr. Johannes Beermann, Dr. Torben Menk

Neue Anforderungen an IKT-Infrastrukturen im Finanzsektor
Yearbooks
Yearbook 2023
In the FIRM Yearbook 2023, we show how the dialog between business and science succeeds in practice. With contributions from 50 authors on ESG, payments, cyber risk, artificial intelligence and much more. In addition, reports and position papers from our FIRM Risk Round Tables.

Yearbook 2022
In the FIRM Yearbook 2022, more than 50 authors from business and academia explain in their contributions and studies on ESG risks and taxonomy, cyber risks, consequences of the Corona pandemic, nonfinancial risks, and payments and artificial intelligence in banks, which developments are currently shaping risk management.

Yearbook 2021

Yearbook 2020
