New Delhi November 18, 2005 : Indian Institute of Banking and Finance (IIBF) Mumbai and International Management Institute (IMI) jointly conducted a one day seminar on BASEL-II & Risk Management for the banking sector employees. The seminar was inaugurated by the Shri. S C Gupta, Chairman and Managing Director of Punjab National Bank (PNB).

During his inaugural speech, Shri Gupta said that it was important that the employees of the bank are able to take risk in case they want to register profits for their organization. However, he added that it was important to learn how to apply ourselves in a given situation or react to the market conditions. “ With the dynamic changes happening the financial & banking world, employees will have to train themselves so as to manage risks in a very coordinated fashion,” he further added. According to him, the most important issue was to have sound and effective HR policies, which should enable an employee to tackle any kind of risk positively. The biggest risk facing the industry today is interest rate and with the implementation of Basel – 2, capital advocacy ratio will also get automatically rectified by approximately 2%.

While welcoming the delgates, CEO of IIBF, R Bhaskran, said that during the past one decade, there have been many changes in the Indian financial sector. “to cope of with these changes, the employees in this sector will have to regularly make themselves aware of these changes,” he said. According to him, the most important issue in the whole process was to cope with risk management, which unlike earlier times are more focused now. “ In today’s world, if we do not take risk, we do not get rewards also, “ he added.

Dr Venkata Ratnam, Director, International Management Institute observed that Risk management has several dimensions: political risk, economic risk, financial risk, currency risk, exchange risk, marine risk, etc. International Management Institute is constituting a risk management group (RMG) comprising practioners and academicians interested in the study and analysis and mitigation one or more of these risks. the RMG will be an informal network of practioners and academic documenting and sharing their knowledge and experience and to disseminate the same for wider use among the risk management professionals through workshops and conferences