Stress Testing In Financial Services - Strategies For Success


By M. Isi Eromosele

As the global financial crisis drags on and pressure mounts on governments to take action, there are continuing strains in the economy, unforgiving trial in the court of public opinion, volatility of markets and complexity of financial products, institutions face new challenges in recovering financial strength and restoring confidence.

To reaffirm their credibility, the leadership teams of selected financial institutions are being tasked to build on the earlier albeit short-sighted stress tests and address the broader purpose of sustainable performance and stability.

To thrive in a fast changing world, stress testing and scenario modeling will become a key governance practice and strategic tool at any financial institution of substance.

Given the potential value that boards of directors and management teams can derive from stress testing it has been identified as a critical tool for risk management.




Stress Testing

Stress testing refers to the process of assessing the vulnerability of financial institutions to extreme but plausible market conditions. Stress testing covers multiple risk measures across categories and complements traditional risk models.

It enables institutions to accurately assess risk and define the "risk appetite" of the organization. Stress tests also provide actionable information to senior management for decisions around capital allocation and contingency planning.

Value-at-Risk (VaR) based methods are most commonly used to assess risk across categories such as credit, market and operational risk. These methods calculate risk as the worst case loss that can be incurred over a specified time horizon with a given confidence level.

However, the recent credit crisis has highlighted the limitations of these risk models and has firmly placed the spotlight on stress testing as a critical and integral tool of risk management.

Current Approach And Inherent Challenges

Almost all banks have had some form of stress testing running within the organization. These include stress testing using a range of methodologies starting from deterministic parameter based to the more advanced stochastic stress tests.

However, stress tests in most institutions, especially on the banking book, are done in an ad-hoc manner. They are conducted by different silos in the bank and definitions of scenarios and methodologies used to stress test vary across sections of the portfolio.

Moreover, scenarios are not severe enough to reflect the impact of financial crises in the event of change in these conditions.

As a result, institutions potentially fail to accurately estimate the impact of a scenario at the enterprise level. Scenarios that could have had a severe impact at an organization level get ignored in the silo approach to stress testing.

Stress tests are carried out as a standalone exercise for the purpose of regulatory reporting. Institutions rarely use these results in the risk management and capital planning decisions.

Another challenge that institutions face is the “black-box” and rigid nature of their risk management systems. Stress testing within these systems is restricted to capital calculations and is used primarily for regulatory reporting.

These systems do not provide the ability to slice and dice stress output by various dimensions so as to isolate the risk hot-spots, thereby limiting its use as a strategic decision making tool.

Recommendations

Financial institutions need to adopt an enterprise-wide, flexible and robust framework that is able to address the current and future stress testing needs of the organizations.

Banks need to implement industry-standard technology solutions that have robust data management and modeling capability coupled with the flexibility to rapidly develop and deliver stress test results.

This includes the ability to have a common repository of scenarios that can be used to deliver stress measures across banking and trading book portfolios.

Business Goals and Requirements for Enterprise Wide Stress Testing

Institutions will have to address several key issues in adopting an enterprise-wide stress testing program.

One such issue is defining coverage in terms of the measures that need to be stressed. The list of measures would include elements from the assets and liabilities side of balance sheet, P&L and liquidity areas. Stress testing this comprehensive list will provide an enterprise-wide view of the impact of a scenario.

Banks need to have a central and common repository of scenarios and models. Scenarios, defined as shock to risk factors, are to be developed taking inputs from multiple sources including judgment from business managers, economists and through the use of quantitative techniques.

Specification of shock needs to allow for multiple techniques such as absolute shift, standard deviation shift and term structure twists and inversion.

In addition to a central repository of scenarios, banks also require a central repository of models. This model repository needs to pull in models lying in multiple silos without altering their calibrations.

A central repository is a key step in providing an enterprise wide assessment of stress, taking into consideration the interplay of risk factors.

An important first step in definition of a scenario is the identification of risk factors. Risk factors are indicators of economic conditions and financial institutions need to identify the ones that influence their risk profile.

An exhaustive list of such factors should be identified based on expert judgment and verified using statistical methods. Institutions need to use techniques such as auto-correlation and factor analysis to identify the risk factors relevant to each segment of their portfolio.

Banks also need to have in place methodologies to stress each of the risk measures. The complexity of these methodologies will depend on the nature of the variable being stressed and would in general, involve use of statistical techniques.

Holistic Approach

Enabling enterprise-wide stress testing would require evolved technology solutions that can couple data management capabilities with complex computations required to stress test a wide variety of risk measures using multiple scenarios.

Stress testing approaches and regulatory requirements are going to evolve rapidly. Banks will require technology solutions that are extensible and are able to provide a central environment that can host models existing in different silos of the organization and stress them in a holistic manner.

These solutions would enable senior management to take strategic decisions on capital management & business planning by providing extensive capabilities on enterprise-wide stress testing.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance
Copyright Control © 2012 Oseme Group

0 comments:

Copyright 2010 - 2013 © Oseme Finance
&