Happy Independence Day!

iStock_000001913448XSmallBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

The Glass Hammer is taking a long weekend to celebrate Independence Day. If you’re not out watching the fireworks, why not take a few minutes to catch up on a few of our recent most popular stories?

And, don’t forget to check out our Thursday, July 8 event: Women in IT – Staying Technical and Getting to the Top. We’re also planning two more events for this fall, so keep an eye on our events page!

Finally, The Glass Hammer is always looking for more writers. Do you have a story to tell? Email me at melissa@theglasshammer.com and we’ll talk about putting your voice on the site!

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The Heart of Risk Management? Data

iStock_000002641638XSmallBy Sophie Fletcher (Chicago)

At the heart of risk management is data management. This is according to three speakers at the Securities Information and Financial Markets Association’s (SIFMA) Technology Expo. Edward Hida, partner at Deloitte & Touche, Keith Sexton, the global director of the financial markets at IBM, and Chris Church, the CEO of SWIFT Americas were all given the opportunity to explain how their companies were tackling risk management.

Deloitte Surveys Market Participants For Answers

Deloitte & Touche interviewed regulators, securities broker-dealers, banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, and exchanges to find out how they defined and viewed systemic risk. They also set out to discover what information was needed from these financial institutions to identify, measure and monitor systemic risk.

What they came up with was a variety of approaches involving regulators, clearing houses and financial institutions that would help manage and measure a firm’s exposure to risk. The range of solutions involved regulators developing stress tests and financial institutions performing, analyzing and reporting the results as well as regulators developing a consistent standard for enterprise-wide risk reporting across the market.

Hida also described an approach that involved building a trade repository where firms would provide data and where regulators and clearing houses could measure and monitor that information in terms of risk exposure.

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Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do You Position Yourself for Two Different Careers?

jobsearchContributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart™

I had a client who had started a business that needed a cash infusion. At the same time, recognizing that cash flow was an issue, he started to explore going back in-house (he had been a successful banker before starting his own shop). He needed to position himself as both an entrepreneur and an employee without diluting either focus or confusing his market. How do you position yourself for two different careers?

I see this conundrum more and more. On the entrepreneur/ employee front, more people are starting side businesses or picking up consulting projects. But even when one is committed to traditional employment, jobs are wider in scope and you may find yourself with a role that is a compilation of several different functions. I reconnected with an old hire of mine from my media days, and she was straddling PR and marketing in the same firm. Consequently, she was unsure how to talk about both without diminishing her experience in either.

Positioning is framed by two things: who you are; and what you are targeting. So the above conundrum seems to revolve around the first half – confusion on how to express who you are. But it really is more about the second – describing who you are in the context of your target. If you are sure about your target, you can easily find a way to talk about your two (or more) sides in a way that adds value to your target and therefore makes you the logical choice, not the outlier.

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