Every business is exposed to financial risks on various fronts depending on the nature of the underlying business and the business borrowing. At Citi, we follow a strategic approach to manage your financial risks. The first step is identifying all risks that can impact your revenues and profitability.
Interest rate risk: If your business has debt on its balance sheet, fluctuations in interest rates can impact profitability.
Foreign exchange risk: If your business has overseas trade operations, you are likely to be exposed to foreign exchange risk arising from currency volatility.
Commodity risk: Fluctuations in commodity prices can impact the cost of your raw materials.
Once all exposures that have a direct and indirect impact on the earnings are identified, we will perform an impact analysis to prioritize key exposures.
Quantifying the risk exposure using the relevant metric is the first, key step towards establishing a risk management framework.
In addition to the traditional measure VaR (Value at Risk), to quantify your firm's exposures to the changes in market factors under normal conditions, Citi also employs sophisticated tools such as CFaR (Cash Flow at Risk), and EaR (Earning at Risk) to factor in long-term cash flows. The final impact of risks on the company is examined from a holistic perspective, accounting for individual exposures, volatilities and cross-correlations.
To make sure that you stay in control even in unforeseen events, we conduct comprehensive stress testing and scenario analysis.
Quantifying risk provides the base from which a risk strategy can be drawn up. Citi partners with you to help define your risk management strategy. We will give you all key inputs including:
- Earning performance of the company on expected and worst case scenarios given market movements
- Scenario analysis: considering possible future market conditions
- Cost-benefit analysis: hedging has to be cost-efficient
You could adopt one of the following strategies:
- Keep naked positions on exposures
- Hedge all your exposures all the time
- Strike a balance between hedging specific exposure and leaving some unhedged.
The final decision is solely yours. We strongly advocate that you deliberate on the pros and cons of each approach and adopt a strategy that suits you best.
Citi is a dominant market player in fixed income, currencies, commodities and derivatives. Our experienced sales professionals endeavor to understand the dynamics of your industry. Our specialist structuring team can belt out a full range of solutions to best meet your needs. We make it a point to exploit natural hedges and partial hedges in your exposures so that hedging is cost-effective.
Leverage our unmatched structuring capabilities to devise innovative products to help you manage your exposures in line with your financial objectives.
Ours is a true relationship based approach. Once the hedging solution is implemented, we do periodic reviews to keep your hedge effective at all times, we can assist you with dynamic hedging by periodically rebalancing positions.