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Market Risk Middle Office - Operational Control Assessments

Client: A global US Bank

Background

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The Market Risk Middle Office supports the processing of VaR, sVaR, Stress, Default Exposure, Volcker and Capital reporting.  Increasing regulatory and internal requirements resulted in the adoption of many tactical solutions to report and aggregate risk resulting in increased complexity, interdependencies, manual processes and compensating controls.  Roles and responsibilities while defined were inconsistently followed.

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Our Role

 

  • Perform operational control assessments of 6 processes supported by the Market Risk Middle Office:

  1. Market Data Monitoring

  2. VaR

  3. sVaR

  4. Market Risk Capital

  5. Stress

  6. Volcker

       

       to identify:

  • Gaps in roles and responsibilities

  • Potential control issues

  • Process improvement opportunities

  • Technology enhancements 

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Outcome

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  • Each assessment took 6-8 weeks to complete depending on the complexity of the process

  • Performed activity analysis to identify bottlenecks, inter-process communications, hand-offs, non value added activities, wait time and areas for improvement.

  • Documented functional roles and responsibilities across all stakeholder groups

  • Developed procedures where none previously existed

  • Identified control weaknesses which were subsequently addressed

  • Worked with stakeholder groups in acceptance and transfer of responsibilities

© 2013 by Quantum Strategic Advisory

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