Still on the subject of risk: the big problem facing banks tasked with holding capital for new-fangled operational risks – a central feature of the Basel II capital accord – is a lack of forecasting data. What is the probability of a fraud, a blackout or some other kind of disaster occurring? And where should efforts to prevent disasters be concentrated?
Insurance company Aon has spent the past two years trawling through its records to come up with a database containing information on 10,000 financial sector losses and a further 3,000 events in the public domain going back 10 years. Now Aon OpBase is on the market, allowing banks to navigate their way through the maze.
“We have pulled together the information we had from all around the globe and put it into a format allowing comparison to be made between events,” says Aon’s executive director Daniel Butler. “OpBase is the first truly scaleable product, allowing banks to calculate possible losses by asset size, earnings size and business line.”
