‘The current worldwide financial crisis also puts its finger on Risk Management, and this at all levels of the bank internal control and external supervisory chain. No doubt one of the weaknesses of the current system in place is its extreme silo thinking. The authors are to be congratulated on trying to break free from this intellectual as well as practical deadlock by presenting a much more holistic approach. No doubt all interested in Risk Management will learn a lot from reading this book.’
Paul Embrechts, Department of Mathematics and RiskLab, ETH Zurich

‘A great work of unification and simplification. Contrary to most books who like stressing the complexity of financial analysis, this book demonstrates a reality which is much simpler than otherwise presented. Once the correct building blocks and structures are set, different fields of finance as diverse as accounting and option pricing disclose their unifying roots and a complexity, that is manageable. This is the right kind of simplification revealing a sign of intelligence. This book gives the reader a comprehensive view of the generation of risk and revenue from financial contracts to institution level.’
Julien Delbet, Head of Asset & Liability Management, Retail Banking, Société Générale.

‘The authors present an integrated framework that emphasizes the commonalities rather than the differences between various approaches to financial analysis. In the process, the book bridges numerous practical and conceptual gaps between financial theory, risk analysis, management/control, and accounting, and yet still manages to avoid bogging down in arcane vocabulary or unnecessary technical detail. Readers ranging from financial practitioners and risk managers to IT professionals will benefit from giving this book a serious read.’
Christopher L. Culp, Adjunct Professor of Finance, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Honorarprofessor, Universität Bern, Institut für Finanzmanagement

‘Can our current systems of accounting, which are so expensive and murky, be replaced by a system that produces genuine financial transparency without being even more expensive? I did not think so, till I read this book. With increasing astonishment, I realised that if, as a result of the current crisis, there actually is increased regulation, and companies are simply respond in their usual way –”each regulatory request triggers new projects inside each bank, lasting for many man years” – then increasing regulation will increasingly strangle all companies, whether financial or non-financial. But the good news is that there is a way through.’
Professor Prabhu Guptara

‘While there are many theories in any branch of knowledge which contribute to its complexity, there are only a few which attempt to simplify the things. The book which has been reviewed in this issue has just this characteristic. It attempts to simplify financial analysis, and in the process coins quite a few path-breaking concepts, one of which is standardising and classifying financial contracts. Those readers who will eventually read this book will not be able to restrain their feelings of both awe and delight at the simplicity with which its authors have handled the complexity of modern financial products, and their analysis.’
Hari Mishra, Editor of Cpmpliance, Risk&Opportunity June 2009 issue

‘In any branch of knowledge, most of the progress is expansive – exploring, modeling, and explaining new areas. In time, such progress creates a large number of seemingly unconnected theories or pieces of knowledge. Then someone comes up with a theory which puts all these unconnected pieces into a grand design. More often than not, such theories are simple and elegant, such as E=MC2 of Albert Einstein, with whose quote ‘make everything as simple as possible as but not simpler than that’ the authors begin this book. ‘Our focus lies on the analysis of financial analysis and not a specific analytical need,’ they announce in the preface. The book does full and complete justice to its title – ‘Unified Financial Analysis’.’
Review in The Indian Banker, June 2009

‘I was lucky to be able to participate in this course as a guest, since I am not a student anymore: I am an IT consultant, who believes that in order to properly deal with IT systems, it is important to also have some understanding of their purpose and of the meaning of the data which is being processed. I got much more out of this course than I had expected: Rather than only filling in the gaps in what I thought I knew, I got a whole new perspective in which so many aspects of the world of finance make so much more sense!’
Norbert Bollow, Student at University of Zurich on the lecture based on Unified Financial Analysis

‘Unified Financial Analysis provides a consolidated view of various finance topics encountered during a normal finance student’s curriculum. Methods and problems discussed in risk management, bank accounting, corporate finance, financial economics, asset pricing and quantitative finance all merged in this lecture providing a larger scale view for understanding how these various fields work together. A must course for finance students to structure their accumulated knowledge.’
Tom Roth, Student at University of Zurich on the lecture based on Unified Financial Analysis