Benchmarking operational risk stress testing models

Abstract

The Federal Reserve's Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) requires large bank holding companies (BHCs) to project losses under stress scenarios. In this paper, we propose multiple benchmarks for operational loss projections and document the industry distribution relative to these benchmarks. The proposed benchmarks link BHCs' loss projections with both financial characteristics and metrics of historical loss experience. These benchmarks capture different measures of exposure and together provide a comprehensive view of the reasonability of model outcomes. Furthermore, we employ several approaches to assess the conservatism of BHCs' stress loss projections and our estimates for the conservatism of loss projections for the median bank range from the 90 th percentile to above the 99 th percentile of the operational loss distribution.