An AFP CTC Corporate Treasurers Forum in New York, early in May discussed whether treasurers should lead the enterprise risk management function instead of the internal audit group.

Opinions varied:

• in most companies, the process is pretty well-developed, and treasury historically have not been involved with ERM unless we fight for it.
• internal audit will at no time be successful leading ERM programmes because they never convert the risk into cash flow. One corporate treasurer went to this CFO, and said, "I can save you totally useless meetings. I can do an analysis of scenarios and risk." and that was how they got the program.
• one treasurer felt that the concept of treasury leading ERM sounds "nuts" to him.
• another treasurer is "very proud" that treasury owns ERM at his organization, for two reasons, "One, my people need to understand how the business works. We do catastrophe scenarios. They have to understand and document how the scenario would occur and its impact on the business. And two, we do the cash flow modeling around that. It's very interesting and challenging, and the business guys don't have a clue how to do cash flow modeling. So treasury has to own ERM."