RWA Optimisation PDF
RWA Optimisation PDF
RWA Optimisation PDF
92(1)
Abstract. This study is devoted to the problems of improving the banking risk management, taking into
account the new regulatory and technological requirements based on the use of modern technology and
combining the latest achievements in artificial intelligence, numerical mathematics, statistics and information
technology.
The paper analyzes the characteristics of banking risks, the main methods of assessment used in practice. The
authors propose new prospective approaches to assessment, based on the most modern methods of data ana-
lysis, identify prospective directions for banking information system improvement and suggest the possibility
of their implementation.
The example of Ukrainian banks shows the main problems of using new approaches to risk assessment and its
information support. The article proposes the ways to overcome them.
Key words: banking risk management, artificial intelligence, banking risks estimation, data analysis
Introduction
Since a few years ago there was a financial crisis, the Basel Committee on Banking
Supervision is developing new international regulations designed to minimize the
possibility of the next large-scale financial crisis. The latest Committee “frame” (Basel
III) includes strict capital rules which will force all banks to increase more than three
times the capital amount in order to avoid the future rescue by taxpayers. It does not
require significant capital growth: according to the Basel Committee studies, 100 largest
banks worldwide need only about € 370 billion of additional reserves to meet the new
rules in 2019 (Moshinsky, 2012). The main purpose of the Basel III is to improve the
quality of risk management in the banking business, which in turn should enhance
financial system stability as a whole.
In Ukraine, as well as around the world, the task of risk management is no longer
considered separately from the problems of capital management and profitability. The
* Corresponding author.
Economic Cybernetics Department, Faculty of Economics, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv,
Vasylkivska Str. 90a, 03022 Kyiv, Ukraine;
e-mail: [email protected]
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rapid business development on the background of growing competition requires a more
careful operation profitability assessment and customer service quality improvement. This
resulted in the fact that, together with increasing business demands, new technological
requirements reached a fundamentally new level: an integrated accounting operation
profitability support with regard to risk; risk management specific features for bank
departments; the rate of return and risk for individual agreement analytical accounting;
the availability of a specialized payment for users from bank departments; increased data
quality requirements.
All these problems occur on the background of the tendencies of international
standards’ implementation in financial accounting and risk management, which make a
fundamentally new emphasis on management. Obviously, it is impossible to solve the
new problems by using accounting schemes common for many banks.
Global financial institutions and international organizations, including the World Bank,
the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, are
paying more attention to resolving the issues of financial risk management and control.
For example, the Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision, developed by the
Basel Committee, emphasize the need for the banks information systems that allow to
accurately measure, monitor and adequately control the financial risks (Basel, 2011).
For years, the IT departments of Ukrainian banks had been solving the task of getting
basic management reporting and data consolidation from various weakly interconnected
operational automated banking systems (ABS). Increasing needs of business units led to
the use of banking information systems for solving analytical problems, which require
new methodological approaches. These tasks involve customer analytics implementation
(client database segmentation, probability of loan repayment calculation, customer
life cycle definition and profitability, etc.), transfer prices calculation, risk indicators
calculation: expected and unexpected loss, instrument sensitivity to a change in the risk
factors, and others.
It is important that these problems are correlated with regulatory requirements of
capital adequacy calculation (according to the recommendations of the Basel Committee
on Banking Supervision – Basel II and Basel III) and financial instruments’ measurement
according to the IFRS standards (based on market or model data). The implementation
of considerable computing task requirements was nominated as a result of the banking
information systems. It goes beyond the functionality of the ABS and is related to
strategic management support, profitability management, financial management and
consolidation, management accounting and budgeting, risk management.
The main objective of banking risk management is maintaining the acceptable
profitability ratios of the safety and liquidity parameters in the management of assets
and liabilities (minimize losses). An effective banking risk management must resolve a
number of problems – from risk monitoring to its valuation. The risk level is associated
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with a particular event and is changing together with the environmental dynamic nature.
This makes a bank to specify its place in the market, to estimate the risk of events, to
review client relations, and to estimate the quality of assets and liabilities, to adjust the
risk management policy.
The process of banking risk management includes the risk forecast, determination of
the probability, values and effects, the development and implementation of measures to
prevent or minimize related losses.
This includes the development of the banking risk management strategy, the decision
making policy allowing a timely and consistent use of all bank possibilities and keeping
risk at the acceptable and controlled level.
A lot of scientific researches are devoted to developing the methodological basis
of financial risk estimation and information support (Lobanov, Chugunov, 2003).
Nevertheless, the latest technology, which combines the achievements of artificial
intelligence, numerical mathematics, statistics, has enabled to suggest new promising
approaches to risk assessment and information support. This will facilitate the
implementation of an integrated approach to finance and risk management.
Risk management is a very important process for any bank. The methodical and
informational risk management support significantly differs depending on the degree
of bank development. This is so because, firstly, the banking risks – credit, market,
operational – differ in their nature and require specific data for their evaluation, and
secondly, risk management information support depends on the banking analytical
system (Poliakov, 2011).
The main direction of banking risk management improvement is the methodological
framework development for risk assessment and banking information systems. This
process should take into account the new regulatory and technological requirements
regarding the implementation of financial and risk management integrated approach.
The study is devoted to these issues.
The task of the study was, first, to analyze the banking risks characteristics, the main
methods of their assessment used in practice; to suggest new promising assessment
approaches based on the most advanced methods of data analysis and, secondly, to
identify the promising directions for improving the banking information systems and to
offer the possibilities of their implementation.
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Management
Financial accounting Risk management accounting
have a strong client base over a long period. It can be used in the behavioral models that
estimate the probability of the default of the client, based on his credit history and scoring
models according to the application (client demographic information, information about
his workplace, loan parameters, etc.). Statistical methods and data mining techniques are
used to develop scoring models, including logistic and linear regression, decision trees,
segmentation using K-means, neural network (Löffler, Prosch, Schöne, 2005). The set
of scoring models according to the application, credit bureaus and information (obtained
from systems to prevent fraud) can determine which customer segments can be approved
automatically and which need further verification by credit analysts. Information about
the most popular credit risks assessment models is systematized in Table 1. This table
includes a few examples of the most often used methods and models for credit risk
evaluation and input data. These are, for example, the Altman Z-Score model (Altman,
2008), Moody’s KMV reduced form and the structural models of credit risk (Arora,
Bohn, Zhu, 2005), the logistic regression model (Hilbe, 2009), hybrid models.
Market risk is a specific part of the financial risks caused by the emergence of
investment and financial activities. Market risk is caused by the influence of the market
factors that affect the value of assets, liabilities, and off-balance sheet items.
There are different methodologies for evaluating the losses of financial instruments.
Most common is the method of quantifying the market risk value of trading positions
(Value at Risk – VaR). The basis for the VaR evaluation is the price tools dynamics for a
specified time period in the past. Classical methods of volatility estimation, such as the
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parametric method, the Monte Carlo method, historical simulation, are used to assess the
potential market risk level (Lobanov, Chugunov, 2003).
The tendency to operational risk is constantly growing with the increase in business
and banking, as well as with the globalization of banking services. Operational risk is the
risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failing internal processes, personnel actions or
systems, or as a result of external factors (Basel, 2006). The concept of operational risk
includes legal risk, but excludes strategic risk and the risk of reputation, contains a list
of possible causes and problems (inadequate business processes, erroneous staff actions,
information systems’ failure, theft, fraud, etc.).
To manage the operational risk, it is necessary to understand its sources, causes, and
the impact on the bank’s activities. This can be achieved only by creating structured
incident database over a long period (minimum 3–5 years). However, it is not enough
to collect periodic reporting and use organizational methods. There is a need of the
professional solution that provides a convenient user interface for incident registration,
business processes support for operational risk management, analytics and operational
risk level calculation employing complex mathematical methods and models (Table 2).
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TABLE 2. Models of operational risk evaluation, implemented in practice
The resulting
Input data Evaluation method Model type
parameter
An adequate amount of Unknown parameters’ Statistical models (actuarial Operational loss
representative historical estimation from a set of approaches, simulation-
data on incidents observations based stochastic differential
equations)
Data collected from Determination of expert Expert model (Delphi Operational loss
experts evaluations, ranks technique, decision trees,
impact diagrams)
Statistical data and Expert evaluations, ranks, Hybrid model (fuzzy Operational loss
expert evaluations unknown parameters and logic, system dynamics
coefficient estimation simulation)
Source: compiled by authors.
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For this method, central banks require qualitative data in all areas of operational risk
and permit to use the advanced method for regulatory reporting formation. Also, a bank
must have a risk management scheme at the professional level and a profound statistical
database of incidents.
Design operational risk management models using the Standardized Approach based
on annual revenue / budget of each line of business / department; the Basic Indicator
Approach based on the annual revenue / budget; the Advanced Measurement Approach
(AMA) based on the internally developed risk measurement framework adhering to the
prescribed standards (the methods include IMA, LDA, Scenario-based, Scorecard, etc.).
The AMA includes developing internal empirical models to estimate the PD (Probability
of Default) for individual clients or groups of clients; assistant risk management
leadership teams with the design of quantitative models to estimate The PD, the EAD
(Exposure at Default), the LGD (Loss Given Default) and other parameters required
for calculating the RWA (Risk Weighted Asset), developing the analytical Value at Risk
models.
While the AMA does not specify the use of any particular modeling technique, one
common approach in the banking industry is the Loss Distribution Approach (LDA).
With LDA, a bank first segments operational losses into homogeneous segments, called
units of measure (UoMs). For each unit of measure, the bank then constructs a loss
distribution that represents its expectation of total losses that can materialize on a one-
year horizon. Given that data sufficiency is a major challenge for the industry, the annual
loss distribution cannot be built directly using annual loss figures. Instead, a bank will
develop a frequency distribution which describes the number of loss events in a given
year, and a severity distribution whigh describes the loss amount of a single loss event.
The frequency and severity distributions are assumed to be independent. The convolution
of these two distributions then gives rise to the (annual) loss distribution.
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ТАBLE 3. The newest approaches to VaR estimation
Models based on the extreme values theory can find VaR for market and operational
risk with the level of reliability higher than 99%. The model parameters are determined
for (X1, ..., Xn), which is a sample of independent identically distributed random variables
from the distribution of the function extremum:
min{X 1 ,..., X n } − bn
P ≤ x → G ( x) with n → ∞, where {an} and {bn} – numerical
an
sequences (Embrechts, 1997).
The advantages of new approaches to VaR evaluation are its accuracy and correctness
assessments even for forecasting a period of one day and a 99% confidence level (for
example, extreme values theory). It should be noted that the Basel Committee on Banking
Supervision (within the approach based on internal models) does not allow banks to use
models with a short-term (less than 250 days) period of observation for capital adequacy
calculation. Based on the covariance method, the VaR calculation model (according to
the criteria of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision) is inadequate for assessing
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the expected losses under a sustainable market development and in times of a crisis.
Another advantage of the new approaches to risk assessment (especially operational
risk) is their ability to give accurate probabilistic estimates even in the absence or lack of
statistical data (for example, the Bayesian model).
The Basel II and Basel III provide additional regulatory requirements the fulfilment of
which allows the banks to assess the risks and to manage them. They enable to optimize
the regulatory capital in terms of the acceptable risk for a certain transaction.
The innovative aspect of regulatory requirements is that the basis for decisions
justification should be statistics rather than individual practice and bank senior managers.
So, quality and data structure requirements become the mainstream.
The task of the new approaches is not to learn the basic calculation methodology, but
to achieve their implementation in a real management of decision making, and this is an
extremely important task of the modern banking information systems.
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STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
OPERATIVE ANALYSIS
OPERATIVE MANAGEMENT
OPERATIVE ACTIVITIES
accounting. A large number of computational problems that require the use of IT solutions
different from the traditional data warehouse are performed at the middle level. The
operational ABS with traditional functions is on the lower level.
It is not required to improve the existing ABS in architecture with separated functions
of operational data, calculations, and analysis with the appearance of new management
challenges. The issue of data availability somewhat complicates the situation due to
the necessity of cross-communications, but this is not contrary to the general logic of
the management structure and its division level. Accessibility calculation results of
individual parameters are solved within the generally accepted approach “service on
demand” in the service-oriented architecture.
The necessity of a powerful banking information management support explains the
growing interest of Ukrainian banks to analytical information systems (SAP, 2011).
Most of the problems in banking information system analytics are solved by their
developers or through the purchase of specialized components from suppliers. This leads
to an uncontrolled growth of the number and complexity of subsystems, increasing the
support cost and the deterioration of ROI (Return On Investment). This approach usually
leads to an unpredictable banking information system development and brings additional
risk factors. The recent studies of leading analytical companies evaluate this approach as
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Level of results
Data model
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management, operational risk evaluation, cumulative risk reports. The possibility
of modeling (PD, LGD, CCF and historical data) is an addition to the measurement
of financial products. Consequently, the most modern techniques of credit, market,
operational risks, and measurement of financial instruments based on the IFRS standards
with regard to market or model data are used for the calculation.
It should be noted that the assessment level may be developed due to the new methods
of evaluation (Table 3).
Conclusions
The article deals with the implementation possibilities of new approaches to risk
evaluation and support on the example of Ukrainian banks.
The research on automating banking activities enables to distinguish the following
tendencies: understanding the role of information technology (IT) as a significant factor
which can strengthen the competitive advantages; bank automation, shifting the focus on
the area of management due to the IT development and analytical decision support tool;
rejection of their own development and switching to the use of standard solutions from
leading banking software producers.
The relevant processes are accompanied by the development and implementation of
the new risk evaluation models. This task is very complex and requires a lot of effort and
considerable financial resources from banks.
The best calculation method selection depends on the data completeness and the
banking portfolio specificity. The main difficulties in the use of new approaches are related
to statistics: unavailable historical data, incomplete or inappropriate data on specific bank
characteristics or credit policy. However, this should not interfere with banks in developing
and applying new business models (such as Bayesian models which in the first phase may
be based on information from open sources or expert opinion). The development of their
own techniques is an extremely important step for the local banks that will further collect
the necessary data for constructing and improving the risk evaluation models.
The Bayesian theory and the extreme values theory are quite effective tools in solving
these problems, but the application of these methods often faces certain barriers associated
with the imperfection of banks’ information systems. An effective data analysis involves
the creation of integrated information systems for risk management and finance, which
are based on a modern analytical system.
The spot approach to the implementation of regulatory requirements costs much
more than the integrated, comprehensive approach (Gartner, 2012). The desire to achieve
compliance with the Basel requirements will create an effective system of integrated risk
management. The next step is an integrated financial management and risk management
which will significantly improve the function of individual banking institutions and
strengthen the financial system as a whole.
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