Well, not necessarily.
But we need to remind ourselves and our stakeholders that that’s really
the point. Losses will happen with
certain regularity. This is the message
of a system of a risk appetite system where the limits are calibrated to a
1-in-10 chance over a one-year horizon.
Whether the implications are really appreciated is a different
point.
A paper by Rene Stulz (here) is a good reminder that
losses may not represent a failure of risk management. This is particularly the case where “managers
[know] exactly the risks they faced―and they decided to take them. Therefore there is no sense in which risk
management failed”. He goes on further
to say that “deciding whether to take a known risk is not a decision for risk
managers. The decision depends on the
risk appetite of an institution.”
This is consistent with the practitioner’s view as expressed
by James Tufts, Group CRO of Guardian Financial Services, expressed in a guest post in this blog: “[T]he
objective of the ‘Risk Function’ should not be ‘risk management’. That’s
a business objective. The objective of the ‘Risk Function’ is to provide
the ERM [Enterprise Risk Management] framework and the source of challenge and
oversight on all aspects of the business model, relative to this framework.”
There may be risk management failures nevertheless and
Stulz’s paper goes on to provide a useful classification:
- Mismeasurement of known risks
- Failure to take risks into account
- Failure in communicating the risks to top management
- Failure in monitoring risks
- Failure in managing risks
- Failure to use appropriate risk metrics
Firstly, banks and insurers track a range of risk events/incidents. It would be useful to consider if reported incidents fall into any of the above categories. Alternatively they may be consistent with risk appetite.
Secondly, insurers and banks using an internal model are expected to use it to support a profit and loss attribution. This means explaining actual profits and losses by reference to the output of the internal model and the risk categories considered. It would be interesting to consider if the losses arise from changes in values consistent with risk appetite or any of the reasons set out above.
The above might seem a simple idea but learning from failures, or risk management failures in this case, is usually anything but a simple idea.
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