Foreign Currency Risk Management

With regard to volatility in foreign currencies, corporate finance people are faced today with having to manage risk on a constantly changing playing field which is ..... with challenges.

Within a regulatory environment recently upset by a ..... of financial scandals, the rules of the FX game are now staggeringly complicated, with an increased burden of compliance on financial accounting and reporting departments.

This has led to a host of issues regarding operations within most multinational companies, transforming FX risk from what was once considered a departmental concern into a ..... risk to the whole enterprise.

This focus on reporting and compliance translates into a shift of resources away from treasury, the traditional ..... for management of corporate risk, and into the controller's office.

Withdraw those resources and add in the demands on treasurers of a seemingly ..... corporate appetite for growth through mergers and acquisitions, and we can see why employee turnover in treasury is reaching unprecedented rates.

..... as a whole, the stress to which the staff, systems and processes that corporations rely on to protect corporate value from FX volatility are subjected amounts to a perfect storm.

From one viewpoint, currency fluctuation risk is a relatively easy risk to handle: exchange-traded options and forward contracts can lock in exchange rates and protect cash flow and financial statements from the effects of currency ......

There are fundamental problems with the underlying transaction data used by organizations to calculate and manage FX exposure, and one contributor to these data problems is manual accounting processes which lead to persistent, ..... errors.

Frequently, such problems show up in regional offices, where a foreign currency transaction is converted on the ..... and entered into the general ledger in the local currency instead of the transaction currency.

Solving the problem will require more rigorous training to ensure adherence to proper accounting procedures and a clear understanding of the impact of ..... practices.