Operational Risk

9 Things They Do Not Tell You About Risk Management

9 Things They Do Not Tell You About Risk Management

Risk management means different things to different people. In this post we explore some truths about professional risk management that highlight both the challenges it is facing as a discipline and the significant role it can play towards a sustainable future

Reading Time: 12 min.
9 things they do not tell you about risk management Risks don’t fall from the sky, they are generated by other people Informal Risk Management was practiced by individuals since time immemorial. This is the domain of intuitive decision-making, assessing a situation on the spot and taking immediate action to avoid obvious risks. Over aeons empirical risk management has collected a treasure of heuristics, rules of thumb and colorful Risk Management One-Liners such as: There is never only one cockroach.
Risk Compensation: From Face Masks to Credit, Market and Systemic Risk

Risk Compensation: From Face Masks to Credit, Market and Systemic Risk

Reading Time: 7 min.
What is Risk Compensation? Risk Compensation is a behavioral model of human attitudes towards risk which suggests that people might adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk. It follows that, depending on the strength of the effect, that it might counteract and even annul the impact of risk mitigation, if the updated attitude and behavior modifies the actual underlying risk Examples of potential risk compensation effects abound A prominent example of potential risk compensation in recent times that established the concept in more formal terms in public policy debates concerned the beneficial role of safety belts in automobiles.
What constitutes a good risk taxonomy?

What constitutes a good risk taxonomy?

Reading Time: 4 min.
What is a Risk Taxonomy? There are various formal definitions of risk taxonomies (and we will go over those below), but it might be useful to first look at a very intuitive example of a risk taxonomy: the classification of fire hazards (also known as fire classes) Everybody knows (or should know!) that the different types of fire (which is the underlying Risk in this context) cannot be treated the same way because they respond in different ways to the substances used to suppress the fire.
Guiding principles for a viable open source operational risk model

Guiding principles for a viable open source operational risk model

Reading Time: 1 min.
Guiding principles for a viable open source operational risk model (OSORM) Such a framework: Must avoid formulaic inclusion of meaningless risk event types (e.g., legal risk created by the firm’s own management decisions) or any risks where the nature and state of current knowledge does not support any meaningful quantification. Such potential risks would be managed outside the framework Must employ a bottom-up design that addresses the risk characteristics of simpler business units first and (if needed) creates a combined profile for a more complex business in a building block fashion.
Fintech Risk Events

Fintech Risk Events

Reading Time: 1 min.
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.
Top 10 Risk Manual Articles

Top 10 Risk Manual Articles

Reading Time: 0 min.
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.
Reducing variation in credit risk-weighted assets

Reducing variation in credit risk-weighted assets

Reading Time: 4 min.
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.
AMA Risk Model

AMA Risk Model

Reading Time: 6 min.
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.
The periodic table of risk elements

The periodic table of risk elements

Reading Time: 5 min.
The periodic table of risk elements You know the periodic table of elements, even if you flunked your science courses! It is the large colorful and blocky table that hanged on every school’s classrooms before becoming yet another mobile app. The periodic table is one of the early and iconic achievements of science. It lists all the pure chemical elements found in nature, the building blocks of all possible material substances.