Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, which is the study of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services; the discipline of financial economics bridges the two. Financial activities take place in financial systems at various scopes; thus, the field can be roughly divided into personal, corporate, and public finance.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) is an international financial institution that offers investment, advisory, and asset-management services to encourage private-sector development in less developed countries. The IFC is a member of the World Bank Group and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. in the United States.
Corporate governance are mechanisms, processes and relations by which corporations are controlled and operated ("governed").
An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital the investor usually purchases some species of property. Types of investments include equity, debt, securities, real estate, infrastructure, currency, commodity, token, derivatives such as put and call options, futures, forwards, etc. This definition makes no distinction between the investors in the primary and secondary markets. That is, someone who provides a business with capital and someone who buys a stock are both investors. An investor who owns stock is a shareholder.
A financial analyst is a professional, undertaking financial analysis for external or internal clients as a core feature of the job. The role may specifically be titled securities analyst, research analyst, equity analyst, investment analyst, or ratings analyst. The job title is a broad one: in banking, and industry more generally, various other analyst-roles cover financial management and (credit) risk management, as opposed to focusing on investments and valuation; these are also discussed in this article.
Shareholder value is a business term, sometimes phrased as shareholder value maximization. It became prominent during the 1980s and 1990s along with the management principle value-based management or "managing for value".
Financial risk management is the practice of protecting economic value in a firm by managing exposure to financial risk - principally operational risk, credit risk and market risk, with more specific variants as listed aside. As for risk management more generally, financial risk management requires identifying the sources of risk, measuring these, and crafting plans to mitigate them. See Finance § Risk management for an overview.
The chief risk officer (CRO), chief risk management officer (CRMO), or chief risk and compliance officer (CRCO) of a firm or corporation is the executive accountable for enabling the efficient and effective governance of significant risks, and related opportunities, to a business and its various segments. Risks are commonly categorized as strategic, reputational, operational, financial, or compliance-related. CROs are accountable to the Executive Committee and The Board for enabling the business to balance risk and reward. In more complex organizations, they are generally responsible for coordinating the organization's Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) approach. The CRO is responsible for assessing and mitigating significant competitive, regulatory, and technological threats to a firm's capital and earnings. The CRO roles and responsibilities vary depending on the size of the organization and industry. The CRO works to ensure that the firm is compliant with government regulations, such as Sarbanes–Oxley, and reviews factors that could negatively affect investments. Typically, the CRO is responsible for the firm's risk management operations, including managing, identifying, evaluating, reporting and overseeing the firm's risks externally and internally to the organization and works diligently with senior management such as chief executive officer and chief financial officer.
Aswath Damodaran, is a Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he teaches corporate finance and equity valuation.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to finance:
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business management:
The CDP is an international non-profit organisation based in the United Kingdom, Japan, India, China, Germany, Brazil and the United States that helps companies, cities, states, regions and public authorities disclose their environmental impact. It aims to make environmental reporting and risk management a business norm, driving disclosure, insight, and action towards a sustainable economy. In 2022, nearly 18,700 organizations disclosed their environmental information through CDP.
Socially responsible investing (SRI), social investment, sustainable socially conscious, "green" or ethical investing, is any investment strategy which seeks to consider both financial return and social/environmental good to bring about social change regarded as positive by proponents. Socially responsible investments often constitute a small percentage of total funds invested by corporations and are riddled with obstacles.
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk, and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones.
The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing is a book by political scientists Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat. Bremmer and Keat are President and Research Director, respectively, of Eurasia Group, a global political risk consultancy.
Risk intelligence is a concept that generally means "beyond risk management", though it has been used in different ways by different writers. The term is being used more frequently by business strategists when discussing integrative business processes related to governance, risk, and compliance.
Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) is a set of considerations, including environmental issues, social issues and corporate governance that can be considered in investing.
Corporate finance is the area of finance that deals with the sources of funding, and the capital structure of corporations, the actions that managers take to increase the value of the firm to the shareholders, and the tools and analysis used to allocate financial resources. The primary goal of corporate finance is to maximize or increase shareholder value.
Ilya A. Strebulaev is a Russian- American financial economist, researcher, author, and speaker with expertise in venture capital, startups, and corporate innovation. He has been a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business since 2004. From 2018 to 2022 he was on the board of directors of Yandex, the Russian equivalent of Google. His book The Venture Mindset comes out in May 2024 by Penguin Random House in the US and John Murray in the UK. International editions in many languages are slotted to be published in 2024 and 2025.
Alex Edmans is a British academic and economist who is professor of finance at London Business School and Mercers' School Memorial Emeritus Professor of Business at Gresham College. He serves on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on the Future of Responsible Investing and as a non-executive director of the Investor Forum. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Financial Management Association, Director of the American Finance Association and Vice President-Elect of the Western Finance Association.
