Few companies in India (and, indeed, globally) have well structured market risk management processes, as a result of which, risk management is often subject to intervention from the highest reaches of the company, which, in turn, most often leads to sub-optimal performance. Again, evolving regulations and accounting rules often require companies to reassess their compliance and valuation processes.

Our effort is to assist companies to understand the lacunae in their processes and assist them to build sustainable risk management frameworks, so that market decision-making is treated as most other corporate functions - viz., executed by experts and overseen by senior management.

To this end, we provide an array of middle and back office services to clients, including

a) Treasury audit - for large companies with reasonably well-run treasuries, this can be a very valuable exercise, since it enables management to take a fresh look at the function to bring it up to current best practices.

b) Risk management policies - that can provide management with a high degree of certainty of the rupee value of their forex flows - i.e., eliminate the likelihood of negative surprises, and enable treasury to try and capture some opportunity in markets

We have designed policies for companies in a wide array of industries from IT to textiles to heavy manufacturing to commodity manufacturing to commodity trading; the underlying approach to risk stays the same, although the overall framework does need to take into account the microstructure of the particular business.

c) Clause 49 compliance audit - for all listed companies; management has to sign off on their risk management practices, encompassing both market and operational risk; while many companies have signed off, the implementation of compliance processes needs to be vetted from time to time

d) Derivative valuations and FAS 133 effectiveness tests - prudent processes require independent valuations of complex structured products and our services in both these areas have been accepted by international accounting firms

e) Advisory on structured finance - with more and more companies accessing international capital markets, we offer an advisory service to enable managements to (a) assess the true - i.e., risk-adjusted - benefit of borrowing overseas, and (b) minimize fees on the borrowing program, while ensuring success of the operation