New Capital Calculations for Basel II Op Risk

It was to be expected that the proxy system for calculating Basel II operational risk capital was always dangerously simplified and consequently fraught with inaccuracies that would under or overestimate capital. A recent publication from the Bank for International settlements confirms what risk practitioners have feared for years and in this post, we take a look at the new recommendations that have been released from the Bank for International settlements.

Shape of Risk - When things break

In the first article on The Shape of Risk [LINK], we investigated why risk practitioners who simplify risk evaluations to a single point estimate will miss the shape of risk and we demonstrated this problem by comparing two very similar but independent risks side by side.

Our inaugural posting on the Shape of Risk series (I fair there might be a few chapters to come yet) attempted to keep the analysis lucid by only focusing on the comparable magnitude aspect of two risks and while the Shape of Risk part I is a nice bite size read, it leaves the frequency of a potential risk event untreated.

In this blog posting we'll address measurements around the likelihood aspect of risk accordingly and hopefully in the same straightforward manner.

The shape of risk

Risk practitioners who evaluate risk as a single number will miss the shape of uncertainty.

If risk is the effect of uncertainty on objectives, just as ISO 31000 defines it to be, we need to accept that there are many ways to describe this uncertainty.  In this short blog posting I am going to demonstrate that risk has shape and being able to dimension this shape will tell us a lot more about the underlying risks we have to manage.