Banking and risk management

Where perspectives meet

The BIS offers financial services to some 140 central banks and monetary authorities worldwide, many of which invest part of their foreign exchange reserves with us.

We're well placed to understand the risk and return objectives that central banks pursue, and to respond to the evolving needs of reserves managers. Our approach centres on the open exchange of expertise and ideas, and a long-term perspective.

The Bank's financial and operational risks are overseen by an independent, risk management function that is also responsible for ensuring an integrated approach to risk management.

Each BIS customer has a dedicated relationship manager who is responsible for promoting the Bank's financial services. We offer a full range of fixed income, money market, foreign exchange, gold and asset management services. You'll work closely with our customers to gain a clear understanding of their investment objectives and constraints and their overall foreign exchange management requirements.

Working as a dealer, you'll have close exposure to both the markets and the central banks. You will be contributing to the development of new products, as our fixed income and money market treasury products are tailored to the evolving needs of central banks. This makes it a fascinating and rewarding place to work.

In these roles, you'll be managing portfolios of government bonds and high-grade fixed income instruments on behalf of our customers. It will be your aim to deliver consistent outperformance against the benchmark, without adding significant risk. Even though our product range is rather compact, the size of the investments you'll be managing and the variety of the work will offer you plenty of opportunity to learn and grow.

In this middle office role, you'll have the opportunity to work on a wide range of risk management issues, which will offer you a stimulating learning curve. Although organisationally independent from the front office, risk analysts work closely with their customer-facing counterparts. Furthermore, interaction and cooperation with the central banking community is very satisfying.

Our settlement officers oversee transactions for our central bank customers. Working with a wide range of different currencies makes these back office roles highly demanding. Your work will help safeguard the integrity of the BIS' banking business.

The high level of interaction between risk managers and other colleagues in the Bank makes this a good environment to work in as a risk management specialist. The strong focus on managing risk that you would find in an institution like the BIS still requires creativity and innovation to help solve new issues. Access to the BIS' research data and a culture of preparing research thoroughly help to enable top-quality work.

Our financial risk managers develop the Bank's financial risk strategy and policy. The main operational tasks are to measure, control and report the financial risks taken by the BIS and to ensure that this risk management activity is supported by sound processes, methodologies and IT systems.

Our operational risk managers support the business units in identifying, managing and minimising the operational risks that the BIS faces. It is not possible to avoid operational risks and the potential for associated financial and non-financial losses altogether. However, it is possible to mitigate such losses through appropriate policies and procedures.


Leading worldwide cooperation

At the BIS, we have an internationally collaborative approach. A good example of this is the opportunity our Banking team regularly has to design investment vehicles known as BIS Investment Pools (BISIPs) guided by an advisory committee of central banks. The most recent BISIPs allow participating central banks to invest in assets denominated in Chinese renminbi and Korean won.


Life at the BIS

The Banking Department operates out of two closely linked dealing rooms: one at our head office in Basel and the other at our representative office in Hong Kong SAR. Our risk management specialists are mostly based in Basel but some work in Hong Kong.

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