Stress testing

How New Regulations Are Breaking Down Silos. Part 2: Look at Economics

An institution “needs to have a strong cross-risk function which coordinates all parties in order to influence the recovery plan,” said Dr. Andrea Burgtorf, Head of Stress Testing, Risk Analytics and Instruments at Deutsche Bank. She was speaking at the GARP webinar on May 21, 2013 about the effect of new regulations on risk management. As part of the Basel III mandate to develop a Recovery and Resolution Plan, a bank must include analysis of all critical economic functions, and this, said Burgtorf, “forces a bank to examine what are its core and non-core businesses, and to decide which governance […]

How New Regulations Are Breaking Down Silos. Part 1: Stress Testing

“Financial regulators have introduced stress testing as a means to cut across silos,” said Dan Travers, VP of Product Management, Adaptiv at SunGard and the opening speaker at a GARP webinar on May 21, 2013. Historically, he noted, financial risk has been treated as a set of separate units (or silos) across the main types of risk: credit, market, operational, and liquidity risk, the latter connected to asset-liability management (ALM). The new reporting demands of Basel III and Dodd-Frank serve to break down silos, Travers said, with such things as incremental risk charge being reported as capital percentage for the […]

Stress Testing: Part 2. The Next Generation

There are five key considerations for the “next generation” of financial stress testing, said Tom Kimner, Head of Americas Risk Practice & Global Risk Products at SAS. He was addressing a webinar audience on May 7, 2013 as the second speaker in a panel organized by the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP).  Modern stress testing must be measured against the key considerations of performance, efficiency, completeness, transparency, and compliance. The goal of turning stress testing into an “early warning system seemed futuristic only a few years ago,” admitted Kimner at the outset of his talk. He contrasted the world […]

Stress Testing: Part 1. Balance Numbers and Narrative

“Uncertainty is a fundamental part of business. Major shifts occur without warning, triggered by a single event, or combination of unrelated, contemporaneous events,” said Sanjiv Talwar, Managing Director, Risk Capital & Stress Testing at Bank of Montreal. He was addressing a webinar audience on May 7, 2013 as the first speaker in a panel organized by the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP).  He summarized the categorization of uncertainty by Courtney et al. in “Strategy Under Uncertainty”, Harvard Business Review. There is a variety of tools available to help manage the uncertainty, Talwar noted: option evaluation, game theory, pattern recognition, […]