Risk Management

Our Risk Management function contributes to our company's success by promoting a disciplined risk culture and creating risk transparency. It also ensures that we adopt a prudent and intelligent approach to risk-taking that appropriately balances risk and return and optimizes the allocation of capital throughout the Group to benefit shareholders and other stakeholders. A significant number of employees and considerable technological resources are focused on ensuring that Credit Suisse Group remains a leader in the field of risk management. Moreover, through its proactive risk management culture and the appropriate qualitative and quantitative tools, the Group strives to minimize the potential for undesired risk exposures in its operations.

Key Objectives

Prudent risk-taking is an integral part of our business. The primary objectives of our risk management strategy are to protect the financial strength of our business and to safeguard our reputation. Our risk management framework is therefore founded on the following principles, which apply universally across all businesses and risk categories.

Protection of financial strength: at Credit Suisse Group, we carefully monitor and control risk in order to limit the impact of potentially adverse events on our capital and income streams. It is essential for our risk appetite to be consistent with our financial resources.

Safeguarding of reputation: the value of our franchise depends on our reputation. All of our employees are therefore committed to maintaining our good reputation.

Risk transparency: risk transparency is essential in order to ensure that risks are well understood by senior management and can be balanced against business goals.

Management accountability: our various businesses own the comprehensive risks that are assumed in the execution of their operations. The leaders of our respective businesses are responsible for the active management of risk exposures and for the return generated on the basis of the risks that were assumed.

Independent oversight: risk management is a structured process that is used to identify, measure, monitor and report risk. The Risk Management, Controlling and Legal & Compliance functions operate independently of the front-office units to ensure the integrity of risk and control processes.

Diagram: Credit Suisse Group's risk management – general organization