How to Stress Test Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction In recent decades we have been collectively spared the haunting images and existential anxiety provoked by the sight of detonating nuclear weapons for testing purposes - not to mention the increased levels of radiation in the atmosphere and other side-effects. This achievement is largely thanks to a series of treaties to control nuclear bomb testing that have been signed and enforced by most (unhappily not all) countries worldwide.

The Promise of Open Risk Data There is a legend that every time a data set is released into the open, somewhere dies a black swan Well, it is not a true legend. Legends take centuries of oral storytelling to form. In our frantic age, dominated by the daily news cycle and viral twitter storms, legends have been replaced by the rather more short-lived memes and #hashtags. Black Swans need no introductions The whole informal theory of black swans concerns improbable events (low likelihood events) that come as a nasty surprise and have large impact.

Seeking clues for financial stability from quantum physics How physicists discovered why the world is stable Physics is one of those remarkably successful branches of science that have helped shape the modern era. Let your gaze drop on any man made gadget in your surroundings and its likely that its working principles go back to a fundamental discovery in physical science that dates back no more than two hundred years or so.

If banks were airlines Ever since the scary turbulence of the Great Financial Crisis it has been instructive and illuminating to compare the travails of the financial industry with the state of other industries, especially those more down to earth, also known as real world industries. The automotive industry was particularly handy for good analogies: Almost all of us have first-hand experience with the successes and failures of risk management when it concerns cars and driving.

Lehman, Brexit, De-Regulation and the future of EU fintech The decision by the citizens of the United Kingdom to vote against continuing membership of the European Union (#brexit) will have wide ranging repercussions on many facets of the European (and even global) economic system. As of early 2017, we see this trend further reinforced by a new US administration that aims to revisit a wide range of policy choices, including aspects of financial services regulation.

Transparency, collaboration key to regaining trust in financial services In banking, confidence is the first order of business Maintaining the confidence of market participants, clients, shareholders, regulators and governments is uniquely important for the financial sector. Trust is, quite literally, the real currency. Yet it is a truism that confidence is hard to build up and rather easy to destroy. Why is this so? The short answer: The difficulty in rebuilding trust is linked to the lack of transparency.

We are hiring artificially intelligent bankers Job Specification for an Artificially Intelligent Banker The Artificially Intelligent Banker is responsible for the overall management of the AI2H (AI to Human) lending department. The following requirements (job specifications) were determined by extensive data mining analysis and derived from the job description as crucial for success in the Artificially Intelligent Banker role. The successful candidate for the Artificially Intelligent Banker position will possess the following qualifications:

Eternal Risk Management One-Liners A single line is sometimes the only thing that separates you from disaster Do you know of any good one-liners that saved the day at one point? (Update May 2017) We moved the list to the Open Risk Manual for easier editing and contributions Send us your favorite one-liner to include in the list. Please indicate what type of attribution you prefer (anonymous, nickname, full name etc.

Accounting probably would not count among the more glamorous of professions. The reasons for that status and whether it is justified are beyond the scope of this brief commentary. What is interesting to note, though, is that the relative attractiveness of accounting is arguably improving, driven by a number of systemic societal developments: the need for more proactive assessment of the state of the world, eliminating the infamous “rear-view mirror” pathology.

Fintech, embrace your inner regulator 2017 is shaping to be the year of #regtech, aka new technology startups setting up digital shop to help the financial services sector cope with its heavy regulatory burden. But what is regulation? Why is it a burden and how does it relate to real risks and risk management? The narratives around financial regulation have been, for some time, completely dominated by the so-called compliance perspective.

How much digital bank can we fit in a 50 euro bill? Much has been said about the impact of Big Data and high-end GPU computing on the provision of digital financial services. At Open Risk we wanted to explore the boundary of what is possible at the diametrically opposite end of the cost spectrum: What is the_absolutely minimum_cost for providing digital financial services? . In this post we begin the journey of finding out the answer to that question and it promises to be fascinating!

StatsNews: Aggregating Economic Open Data news StatsNews Version 1.3 of the RegNews Aggregator includes a separate stream of economic opendata news releases. Regnews is a web app developed by Open Risk to assist with keeping abreast with diverse financial regulatory news releases and publications. The app data are directly derived from the published regulatory RSS sheets (NB some are not conforming to RSS standards). If in doubt please refer to the original feeds (links provided).

Fintech Risk Events Fintech Risk Events is an open catalog of observed and publicized operational failures of fintech business models. The catalog aims to document, in due course, such events reasonably accurately, to allow risk managers understand the (potentially new) vulnerabilities of new financial services models. Scope The scope of the operational risk database is Fintech companies. By that we mean newly established financial services providers that operate exclusively via new (digital) platforms and are (mostly) unregulated.

Regnews: Financial Regulatory News Aggregation Version 1.2 The #RegNews Aggregator is a web app developed by Open Riskto assist with keeping abreast with diverse financial regulatory news releases and publications. The app data are directly derived from the published regulatory RSS sheets (NB some are not conforming to RSS standards). If in doubt please refer to the original feeds (links provided). Copyright of the publications is with the respective authoring institutions.

Top 10 Risk Manual Articles The current list of Top 10 Risk Manual Articles, sorted by reader popularity covers a range of topics in risk management. External Fraud, (Operational Risk) Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, (Concentration Risk) Hannah-Kay Index, (Concentration Risk) Concentration Ratio, (Concentration Risk) Granularity Adjustment, (Concentration Risk) Business Execution, (Operational Risk) Internal Fraud, (Operational Risk) Employment Practices, (Operational Risk) Physical Damage, (Operational Risk) Basel II Advanced IRB Capital Model, (Basel II RWA) The Top 10 is dominated by the Concentration Risk category and the Operational Risk definitions, while the old staple, the Basel II formula for RWA calculations squeezes-in in the tenth place.

The Atlas of Bad Risk Management The Atlas was discovered recently in archaeological work studying pre-crisis civilizations. Despite the obvious wear and tear, all key risk failure areas have been preserved. We note the remarkable diversity of organizational forms and economic structures. Most interestingly, there is even an uncharted territory that was rumored to be inhabited by black swans. We handed over this invaluable treasure to a risk management expert and asked her to identify any similarities with modern risk management challenges.

Reducing variation in credit risk-weighted assets - The benign and vicious cycles of internal risk models March 2016 wasn’t a good month for so-called internal risk models, the quantitative tools constructed by banks for determining such vital numbers as how much buffer capital is needed to protect the savings of their clients. First came the Basel Committee’s proposed revision to the operational risk capital framework applicable to banks, next came a similarly fundamental overhaul of what form of risk quantification will be acceptable for calculating credit risk capital requirements.

Save the AMA whale ΝΒ: This is not a post about real whales and the ongoing struggle to keep these magnificent mammals alive for future generations to marvel at. Hopefully the individuals who have risked their lives to bring the near extinction of many whale species to worldwide attention will not take offense with us usurping imagery linked to this valiant campaign. We simply want to draw attention to another, rather more armchair type of campaign, namely: saving the_AMA risk model.

Risk Capital for Non-Performing Loans Currently many countries are drowning in bad credits This visualization from the World Bank shows the current distribution of non-performing loans (NPL’s in short) around the world, as fraction of the total outstanding loans: Translated in absolute numbers (according to IMF data) the European NPL book alone stands at around 1 trillion EUR. As the adage goes, a trillion here, a trillion there, you pretty soon talk about serious money

Google Summer of Code Ideas List Page Over the course of the years we have seen many an open source project that we love and use daily participate as mentoring organizations in Google’s great communal activity. This year Open Risk applied to join the effort to promote open source, in particular as it applies in the less visited area of financial risk management. The following is a list of ideas for projects where students can participate (subject to us getting approved as mentoring organization!