By Dai Qi
The Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) President Richard Apostolik hopes that China's practitioners get more involved in global risk management activities.
"The Chinese government is involved quite heavily with the world from a regulatory side, but from a practitioner side, not necessarily as much as they may want to be in the future," he said to cfbond.com in a recent interview at the 2018 Tsinghua PBCSF Global Finance Forum.
The association is an independent, not-for-profit organization, and the only globally recognized membership association for risk managers.
"Chinese marketplace is becoming more and more integrated into that of the world. From a risk management perspective, I think the Chinese marketplace has to understand that it plays a major global role and its banking and other institutions need to deal in a global marketplace based upon standardized types of approaches as it might pertain in risk management activities," Apostolik said.
As China opens up its financial industry wider to the outside world, he thinks that China needs to understand how the rest of the world's marketplace works and adopt practices that are common to the entire global market.
But how can China get involved? Apostolik suggested that the country attach importance to risk management education.
"Our organization deals in a global marketplace with educational activities that set standards globally, for example, our financial manager certification program. That's one way for the Chinese marketplace and those who participate in it to say that to objectively demonstrate that they are operating in the same way here in China as people around the globe are operating," he said.
On the other hand, he thinks that the Chinese financial services industry should participate as other institutions do around the globe in cross-border studies and sharing of information.
"That way they can all come from the same common foundation of understanding with practitioners from around the globe and share ideas, approaches and discussions about issues that they feel are important and that the marketplace need to address because nobody is isolated from systemic risk issues," Apostolik said.
Will the organization have more cooperation with China? Apostolik told cfbond.com that he hoped that China could participate in one of their activities called "Bench Mark Initiative."
"It is an entity that does cross-border studies where we do analytical work around various types of initiatives that have been developed either by the banking industry, the financial services industry itself or regulators around the globe. Some studies are undertaken where all these organizations actually submit data, and the analysis is done, the data is anonymized, and results are provided," he explained.
According to him, as of now, the Chinese marketplace doesn't participate in those types of activities, "and we will certainly hope that they be willing to consider participating in the future," he said.
