Climate related catastrophies, including fires, floods and hurricanes, are having a massive impact on businesses and communities. It stands to reason that banks will be affected as well.  Regulators around the world who are increasingly concerned about the impact of climate change on financial institutions recently published a guide to help banks build resilience to climate-related risk. 

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s white paper on green and sustainable banking explains a rationale for introducing measures in this area.

In terms of disclosures and data, the paper notes that financial institutions should take the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) recommendations into account while developing an ‘appropriate’ approach to disclosing climate-related risk that enhances transparency. 

It’s good to see Hong Kong looking to the TCFD recommendations while developing climate-change risk disclosures. A logical next step would be to incorporate structured, XBRL data into mandatory non-financial disclosures, ensuring the climate-risk exposures of Hong Kong’s financial institutions can be easily analysed and compared world-wide. For more, see the XBRL International Website.

By Gerald Trites, FCPA, FCA

Inline XBRL is transforming the way companies file with their regulatory authorities. And, once most of those authorities are on board, it should make life easier for corporate filers everywhere.

Robotic Process Automation is being adopted extensively by companies and available from a variety of vendors, including the big ones like Microsoft, SAP and IBM. It’s used to automate repetitive processes primarily, but certainly not exclusively, in the finance and accounting areas.

RPA has nothing to do with robots, but rather is software that can be used for processes embedded in various applications and platforms, even if they were never intended to interface with each other. Which means it can automate processes without the massive costs involved in changing major applications, like ERP systems.

It is proving useful to companies coping with Covid19, with employees moving to work offsite and back, working remotely and in a central office. When processes are automated they can be carried out more reliably. So RPA is popular for transactional applications, to ensure there is not a lag in production. Several good articles are available on RPA, including the one at this link and the others referenced in that article.