Ebook: Improving Operational Risk Management

Operational risk is possibly the largest threat to financial institutions. The operational risk that financial institutions face has become more complex, more potentially devastating and more difficult to anticipate. Moreover, operational risk management is an essential part of the economic activities and economic development in financial institutions. The credit crunch indicates once more that operational risk does not lend itself to traditional risk management approaches. This is because almost all instances of operational risk losses result from complex and nonlinear interactions among risk and business processes. Mainly motivated by regulatory pressure, the volatility of today’s marketplace and costly catastrophes many financial institutions focused their risk management efforts on operational risk management. In response to this, several initiatives have been taken to manage operational risk. However, due to difficulties with loss data, most of these initiatives focus on using expert judgment to provide the input to estimate the level of exposure to operational risk. Although these initiatives have helped financial institutions, the improvements which are made are not effective, efficient and satisfying. Therefore in this book the is focus on an alternative to improve operational risk management that is more effective, efficient and satisfying. A highly structured approach for operational risk management is prescribed and explained in this book. The approach can operate with scarce loss data and enables financial institutions to understand operational risk with a view to reducing it, thus reducing economic capital within the Basel II regulations.