8. Suggest regulatory and management reforms that might prevent a future debacle of the type that bankrupted Barings.
Due to incidents of staggering losses to corporate and banking entities as early as 1993, calls for financial reforms, particularly in relation to derivatives, had been ongoing for quite some time. However, it took the Baring Brothers bankruptcy to finally bring about action. The Bank of England, SIMEX and the Group of Thirty all created reports on how regulators, administrators, legislators, international firms and associations could address the issues of regulating financial activities.
The Bank of England wrote a report describing how the losses occurred, why they went unnoticed within and outside Barings, and lessons learned. How the losses occurred and why they went unnoticed has already been explained. The Bank produced five lessons from the bankruptcy. They are (Bank of England Report):
a) Management teams have a duty to understand fully the businesses they manage
b) Responsibility for each business activity has to be clearly established and communicated;
c) Clear segregation of duties is fundamental to any effective control system;
d) Relevant internal controls, including independent risk management, have to be established for all business
activities;
e) Top management and the Audit Committee have to ensure that significant weaknesses, identified to them by
internal audit or otherwise, are resolved quickly.
Despite these simplistic recommendations, at least one and usually several, of the points was the reason why
firms lost large sums of money within the derivatives market.