On his way between London and Geneva, the President of the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) Richard Apostolik stopped to meet Florence at the FERMA office in early May to discuss possible future collaboration. GARP is the principal association for training and educating financial risk managers. It has 200 000 members in 195 countries.
Another visitor to the office was David Gibbs of CME Group which provides benchmarking for futures and options products for any exchange and for all major asset classes. He is also interested in professional education for risk managers.
Florence asks – Are FERMA members involved with this aspect of business in their companies? Would you be interested to learn more? She says that when she speaks to outside groups, there is more and more discussion of risk management from an investment point of view.
FERMA also received an approach from PERE magazine as a result of the recent membership of the Luxembourg association, PRiM. PERE and its website www.perenews.com cover the activities of private equity funds and their investors.
In June, PERE is producing a guide to risk management for funds and their investors and would like to know if any FERMA members are working with this industry. If so, would you like to contribute to the guide? Topics include identifying risk in investments, markets and portfolios, best practices in risk management and tools for monitoring and mitigation risk.
Thanks to our collaboration with the European Confederation of Institutes of Internal Auditing (ECIIA), the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) asked FERMA to comment on the definition of internal auditing. The IIA is currently reviewing the definition and asked various stakeholders, including FERMA, for their views to get a broad perspective.