Petra van Hoeken
Risk management
Member of the Managing Board
and Chief Risk Officer
Last year we put a lot of effort into
improving our risk management skills,
behaviour and culture across the bank.
I am very proud of my teams worldwide
- some 3,600 professionals in total - for
their focus and their dedication during
Rabobank's transformation towards
becoming One Bank. We operate in a
complex, regulated world with multiple
stakeholders and, at times, conflicting
interests. By challenging and balancing,
we support new business and growth,
manage risk in our existing portfolios and
deal with non-strategic legacy matters. We
also develop new risk models, innovative
tooling and risk processes, as well as
our understanding of newer risks (e.g.
digitisation, data privacy) and how to
manage them. Change is a constant in
today's world, and our risk teams globally
have demonstrated their agile, adequate
responsiveness.
We made progress in Risk Governance.
Chief Risk Officers have now taken their
seats at the table in the group's key
management teams, where they can foster
better understanding of - and cooperation
on - risk and business, and enhanced
informed decision making. We have
reviewed the composition and mandates
of the many risk committees, and where
feasible, have rationalised with a view to
making roles responsibilities very clear
and improving the efficiency and
effectiveness of risk decision making.
We are holding more frequent In Control
meetings - for each Managing Board
member domain - where senior
management can regularly discuss its own
risk and control self- assessments on the
basis of adequate and honest risk
reporting. We dedicated extra resources on
data and reporting infrastructure.
Becoming more directly involved in and
challenging the budgets, business yearplans
and Medium Term Plans of Risk in terms of
risk appetite and management is another
example of how we are promoting risk
awareness and a proactive culture.
We also made progress in Credit Risk.
The rationalisation of our credit model
landscape, which is also in line with
the Europe-wide Targeted Review of
Internal Models (TRIM) exercise, moved
ahead with the delivery of three models
(the counterparty credit risk model, the
mortgage model and the SME corporate
model) which are awaiting regulatory
approvals. Additionally, we devoted a
great deal of effort in IFRS 9, AnaCredit
and EBA guidelines. The size of our credit
(loan) portfolios is stable and the quality
has improved, evidenced by historic low
provisioning and declining NPLs.
Apart from business as usual, our risk
teams have supported the organisation
with issuance of the covered bonds
(first time) and Rabo certificates, Mifid
II regulatory compliance, and with
strengthening ALM. New developments
and improvements were made in stress-
testing, including the interest rate risk in
the banking book and the ECB stress test
during the summer.
