國際接軌

How can board directors assess risk culture? BDO’s National Leader Financial Services Tim Aman highlights ways to read the warning signs and looks at metrics which may be useful.

Family offices provide an attractive and confidential way to manage the personal financial affairs of ultra-high-net-worth families. Built with a family’s specific needs and goals in mind, family offices are businesses structured around custom financial management with services for a family’s investments, legal needs, accounting, taxes, philanthropy and household management.

Social media presence has become essential in crafting effective marketing strategies for today’s businesses, all thanks to its massive potential in reaching wider audiences and establishing a company’s brand. In 2018, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp counted 2.6 billion active users every single month. Twitter reported 326 million monthly active users over the same period. Indeed, the numbers don’t lie – a significant proportion of the Internet population is on social media. And each and every one of them can be a potential customer.

This was a question posed by one of the director attendees at a recent roundtable event hosted by NACD in partnership with Accenture on how boards can go about building greater cyber resiliency within the organizations they serve. And as a litany of companies have fallen victim to cyberattack and endured considerable financial and reputational fallout—it’s a simple question that demands a nuanced answer.

Starting up any company is hard. Sustaining that company through multiple generations requires constant adaptation to external changes. That innovation through disruption begins with a keen understanding of the family’s identity, values, and traditions. It’s one of the reasons why successful multigenerational family businesses are such compelling illustrations of leadership.

The intense and sustained presence of hedge fund activists in many industries and markets makes it likely that activism produces effects beyond those on activism target firms but academic papers have almost exclusively focused on the effects on firms targeted in activist campaigns. The real effects of activism on other firms, stakeholders, institutions, and markets remain largely unexplored.

Corporate social responsibility in the region lags behind international best practices, which gives Hong Kong a chance to lead by example – by committing to gender equality. HKEX now expects all firms listed here to have a diversity policy.

Digital strategist and CEO of The Female Social Network Fi Bendall shares her insights on how to bring your board into the digital age.

A significant development in the global economy over the last two decades has been the emergence of businesses that organize and define themselves as “platforms.” By platform, we refer to any firm that uses digital technologies to create value by facilitating connections between two or more groups of users. Think Amazon or Alibaba (connecting buyers and sellers of goods), Facebook or Instagram (connecting friends and family), or Uber or Airbnb (connecting service providers and service users). What is common to all platforms is that they make connections between “creators” and “extractors” of value and the platform generates a profit from making these connections, either by taking a commission or advertising.

China is getting ready to be hit by a wave of retirements of ageing business titans who built the private companies that fuelled the country’s economic boom and created its middle class. These companies are nearly all family owned, headed mostly by men who forged empires largely in real estate and manufacturing since China began experimenting with capitalism 40 years ago.