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First Commonwealth Financial Corporation Essay

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FCFC Assignment Questions 1. Will the BSC program at First Commonwealth provide Board members with the information they need to fulfill their governance responsibilities? Does a board really need information beyond the results reported in a company’s monthly, quarterly and annual financial reports? To engage board member’s expertise much more around the strategic direction that the company is taking would require giving different types of information to board and having different discussions in board meetings, but the effort to revamp the meeting process and agenda would be well worth the trouble. With only limited time available to review the information before the meetings and to perform their monitoring …show more content…

The team also proposed to turn Firs Commonwealth into a “world-class” sales organization that could grow organically. And the team wanted all of the bank’s employees to understand the strategy and be fully committed to its implementation. This approach has already provided several important benefits to First Commonwealth’s board. First, it isolates those areas where it is important for the board to perform well, including a variety of governance issues. While the company was developing its directors’ scorecard, it was also complying with both the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and a new set of listing standards from the New York Stock Exchange, which imposed significant requirements on the audit, governance, and compensation committees. Singer, who is president of the Allegheny Valley Development Corp. and, unlike Dahlmann, does not have a banking background, says scorecard has made it easier for her to understand what’s really going on inside the company. “I get much clearer access to operational issues and strategy than I would from a packet of financials,” she says. “It enhances your ability to understand and monitor.” Indeed, the board used to monitor the company almost solely through its financial reports, which are historical in nature. Directors would rarely talk about the bank’s strategy, which is forward-looking by definition. “This has really pulled the organization together around strategy,” says

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