Enhanced management reporting dashboards: three key benefits for financial risk management

The best financial risk management programs capture and aggregate data from across the organization to inform both strategic and tactical decision making. Having insight into accurate, timely, and complete information gives you the details you need to answer crucial questions about your existing exposure and the effectiveness of your risk mitigation plans. Business intelligence tools give you a relevant graphical overview of your risk management program along with the crucial ability to dive into details and take appropriate next steps. In working with treasury teams across multiple organizations, we see three important benefits to enhancing management reporting with expert business intelligence resources.

1. View your FX program at-a-glance

The first key benefit you gain from enhanced management reporting fueled by business intelligence comes from the discernment gained through a graphical overview of your FX program. The quick visual insight allows you to assess which of your entities has the largest exposure, which currencies have the greatest trade notional, or how your derivative transactions are spread across counterparties. You can tell at a glance what the current value of your trades is across various criteria and easily filter the view to display exactly what you need to assess.

When you see a particular area of risk that requires deeper analysis, business intelligence reporting facilitates quickly diving into the details beneath the picture, providing all the information you need to respond to evolving market conditions. If your primary concern is with trades in a specific currency or with a given counterparty, these tools allow you to drill directly into that piece of your data, viewing updated charts on screen or exporting the data to promote additional analysis. Whether you need a broad overview of your entire FX program or a specific visual slice of the data to provide to management and other stakeholders, business intelligence reporting puts your data at your fingertips both on screen and through pdf exports.

2. Monitor the mark-to-market value of your portfolio

Second, enhanced management reporting informs your FX operations by providing insight into the cash and P&L impact of your FX derivative program. As currency markets shift in an often volatile world, you need to keep an eye on the changing mark-to-market value of your FX portfolio; this is especially true when you have a balance sheet hedging program or a significant book of undesignated trades where changes in value will flow directly to your reported P&L. Business intelligence reporting grants you easy access to both the current value of your derivatives and how that value has moved over time; it also gives you insight into how soon those derivatives will mature and what exposure that produces with different counterparties.

Knowing the current value of your derivatives gives you valuable insight into the expected cash impact when those trades mature. Whether you gross settle your FX trades or net settle by counterparty – or even across counterparties – you want as much information as possible about the cash impact of settling those derivatives. Business intelligence reporting grants you that insight either across your entire book of trades or at a more granular level, allowing you to plan cash management and trade rolling instead of being caught by surprise.

3. Gain clarity on what to hedge and when

Third, by incorporating business intelligence into your enhanced management reporting you gain clarity on what to hedge when with a clear depiction of your evolving exposure forecasts, your actual hedge positions, and your expected hedging targets. If your organization manages exposure forecasting with spreadsheets, tracking your projected revenues and expenses and your current hedge positions versus targets on spreadsheets; over time you may see your program become size-constrained and hard to audit as it grows beyond these manual tools. Business intelligence reporting grants you best-in-class insight into the sources of your FX exposures, the level of your current hedging compared with your target goals by currency, and how much unhedged exposure you have for a given currency or entity.

Additionally, you can compare historical forecasts with realized actual expense and revenue numbers, providing the insight you need to determine which entities or exposure types support the highest levels of accurate hedging. Real-time visibility into evolving exposures and the effectiveness of your hedging program allows you to materially reduce month-end scrambling for data and empowers timely decision making on what to hedge in order to reduce volatility.

Enhanced management reporting fueled by business intelligence provides you the insight you need to run your FX program more effectively. Quick access to data grants you both an overview of your hedging program and the detailed analysis your stakeholders expect. Whether you need a portfolio overview, details about the cash and P&L impact of your hedging program, or insight into what hedging steps to take when, solid business intelligence reporting offers you the details you need to answer crucial questions about your existing exposure and the effectiveness of your risk mitigation plans.

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Confidently manage financial risk with ChathamDirect

ChathamDirect is a groundbreaking financial risk management and hedge accounting platform that supports foreign exchange, interest rate, and commodity hedging programs. ChathamDirect provides a clear view of your entire hedging program, including cash flow forecasts, balance sheet exposures, and hedge requests — all securely available on a leading SaaS platform. ChathamDirect is backed by Chatham Financial, an employee-owned, independent market leader with a global team of capital markets experts, risk management advisors, CPAs, lawyers, quantitative analysts, and technology developers who serve more than 3,500 clients annually.