Balancing Act: A Former Auditor’s Perspective on Financial Risk Management
The multifaceted job of financial risk management within corporate treasury includes the effective use of controls to mitigate all sorts of potential threats to a company’s financial stability. But don’t let controls get out of control—implementing too many of them to manage financial risks can inadvertently create operational risks.
That’s a key takeaway from a recent NeuGroup conversation with Bill Brewer, associate director of financial risk management at Bristol Myers Squibb. “If you have five different controls and you need to get a payment out in a certain amount of time, those controls may slow down the process,” Mr. Brewer says, illustrating the point. “While you might reduce the risk of never sending out a payment to the wrong address, you might end up increasing the risk of not sending out payments on time.”