Corporate risk manager

About the Position

We are seeking a Corporate Risk Manager to identify and analyze risks in accordance with a bank’s legal obligations and interests. Specializing in various types of risk, this role involves monitoring standards, preventing potential risks, and reporting duties.

The Life of a Risk Analyst

Analyzing Funding Applications (Credit Risk)

Risk analysts may spend their days investigating funding applications submitted by account managers and customer advisers. Once they’ve analyzed the risk involved, they’ll take a position on the feasibility of the application and pass on their opinion on the related level of risk.

Anticipating and Preventing Potential Risks

To determine the ratio of risk against potential profit, risk analysts have to update, optimize and work with a wide range of different indicators, including risk mapping within their specific fields, working with sensitive risk monitoring lists, running mathematical modelling simulations, reading research papers, quantified analyses, using scoring techniques, and so on. They also have to carry out checks to verify that procedures are being followed and that any amounts of credit authorized are entirely correct.

Monitoring Standards and Procedures

Analysts oversee a range of existing procedures that need to be updated regularly. They also draft new procedures designed to protect banks from various risks. Another key part of their role is drafting incident management procedures.

Reporting Duties

Finally, analysts are responsible for developing dashboards and writing internal reports whilst monitoring the progress of banking operations and any corrective actions that have been put in place. These tasks are far from exhaustive and the scope of activity risk analysts are involved in will vary greatly according to their specialisms and place of work.

Fun Fact

It wasn’t so long ago that risk analysts were often seen as getting in the way and putting the brakes on everything. Since the Jérôme Kerviel affair in France, for example, the importance of the role has been much more widely appreciated by the public globally. At the end of 2007, the Société Générale trader began engaging in unauthorized trading totaling as much as €50 billion, which bagged him €1.4 billion in hidden profits. In early 2008, the bank’s monitoring department detected the anomaly, alerted the banking and financial authorities, and liquidated the disputed holdings. In the end, his losses amounted to €4.9 billion, and Kerviel was sentenced to three years in prison. He was also ordered to reimburse the bank. The amount due was reduced on appeal to a cool one million euros, as the court agreed the trader wasn’t solely responsible. Because even if Kerviel was just an ambitious trader who unknowingly broke the bank’s rules, no one stopped him from placing those investments. But the biggest question remained unanswered: how could this have happened?

Skills

Hard Skills

• Perform clerical duties
• Financial engineering
• Analyse financial risk

Soft Skills

• Active problem identification
• Planning
• Logical reasoning

Typical Educational Background

• Masters in mathematics, statistics, banking, auditing, or finance
• Business studies background with a focus on auditing or finance
• Statistics and finance experience
• Studies related to banking

Locations

• Paris, France
• Luxembourg, Luxembourg
• Ghent, Belgium
• Düsseldorf, Germany

Job Offers Available

• Pernod Ricard Internship 6 months, Paris, France
• Banque Internationale à Luxembourg (BIL) Internship 4 to 6 months, Luxembourg, Luxembourg
• SCOR Internship 4 to 6 months, Paris, France (Simple application)
• EY Full time position, Ghent, Belgium
• METRO/MAKRO Graduate Programme / Job Rotation Programme 19 to 24 months, Düsseldorf, Germany (Simple application)