Incentive Compensation Roundtable & Culture and Conduct Risk Roundtable 2023 | Risk Management Association (RMA) | 8 March 2023 | Kemper Corporation, 200 E Randolph St #3300, Chicago, IL 60601, USA

Incentive compensation programs are important tools for financial institutions. These arrangements serve several objectives, including attracting and retaining skilled labor, promoting better performance, and allowing an organization to better control costs while increasing profit.

If not designed properly, however, compensation arrangements can provide executives and employees with incentives to take imprudent risks that may not be consistent with the long-term health of the organization. Poorly designed incentive programs can inadvertently reward employees, contractors, and service providers for unethical behavior or other unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices.

This roundtable offers a valuable opportunity to meet and discuss these challenges with your peers and identify best practices you can leverage at your institution to enhance the value of your incentive compensation/reward programs. A unique feature of RMA’s Roundtables is that each event agenda is a bit different, because the agenda is driven by a steering committee of your peers and by attendees’ recommendations. Recent topics have included:??
• Sound practices in incentive compensation management
• Regulatory expectations and trends for incentive compensation
• Incentive plan governance
• Employee performance-assessment tools and processes (e.g., scorecard improvements)
• Talent-related challenges including attraction and retention of employees

Who will benefit?
The target audience includes management-level professionals working in human resources and experts creating or overseeing bank compensation and reward programs.

As institutions continue their journey through the pandemic and navigate other emerging risks, the emphasis on culture and conduct in banking is not slowing down. Boards and senior management are focused on demonstrating effective management, measurement, and oversight of culture and conduct. Stakeholders realize that poor culture may lead to misconduct and could have financial and reputational consequences. To properly monitor culture, senior executives are seeking to identify meaningful metrics that link back to their institutions’ overall strategy and risk appetite.

This roundtable offers a valuable opportunity to meet and discuss these challenges with your peers and to identify best practices you can leverage at your institution to enhance the value of your framework for managing culture, conduct violations, and ties to reputation risk.

A unique feature of RMA’s peer-sharing events is that each agenda is a bit different, because the agenda is driven by attendees’ recommendations. We believe topics will likely include:??
• Awareness of culture and conduct—regulatory expectations and trends
• Leading practices in communicating desired culture and behaviors
• Conflict of interest (including gifts and entertainment; exceptions)
• Background checks
• Incident investigations
• Reputational risk components
• Managing incidents like improper sales practices or use of non-bank approved communications
• Governance risk and compliance tools
• Risk training curriculum
• Outside business activities