The Near-Miss Management of Operational Risk

Over recent decades, banks and bank regulators have devoted substantial resources to managing market risk and credit risk. More recently industry and regulatory focus has shifted to the mitigation of operational risk. This article addresses the Advanced Measurement Approaches under which banks would be allowed to determine capital requirements, based on their own internal assessment of operational risk, according to standards set by the Basel Committee. The authors propose adopting the concept of “nearmiss” risk assessment employed in the chemical, health, and airline industries to internally evaluate operational risk.