Credit Risks of Russian Commercial Banks: New Approaches to Management

In the realities of the modern domestic economy, the process of risk management of commercial banks associated to credit corporate customers, acquires new content. The assessment of what place in the company’s activity has a work that contributes to solving the most pressing problems of our time: environment, social and general corporate governance comes to the fore. As a result, the focus is on a group of lending risks known as ESG. Since the areas of work of clients — legal entities, with which these risks are associated, and described mainly by qualitative, non-formalized characteristics, a difficult task for modern bank risk-management becomes normalizing the process of their evaluation when making specific decisions on the loan. This explains the interest and relevance of this research, the object of which is the risk management subsystem for lending to corporate clients by commercial banks, the subject is the consideration of ESG factors in this process. The purpose of the paper is to develop the basics of decision-making tools in the management of bank credit risks, with this group of factors. The authors apply methods of both general scientific (induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis) and special: system and retrospective analysis of existing developments in the field of justification of decisions of bank risk management. The theoretical significance of the research results consists in a complex analysis of the role and place of ESG-risks in the overall risk landscape and the integration of environmental, social and managerial factors into credit risk assessment. Basic principles of construction of phenomenological model, used to support credit decisions by banks of corporate clients taking into account ESG-factors that influence their activity, have been developed.

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