 The imperative of considering operational risk in the context of banks is to ascertain an amount in currency which, if maintained by the bank as capital, should (in theory at least) fully compensate for the expected impact of crystallization of the operational risks faced by the bank.When this “operational risk requirement” is added to the other elements of a bank's prudential capital requirement (relating to non-operational risks faced by the bank), the resulting total gives the bank's “total capital requirement”.Some forms of ODD fit neatly within the banking paradigm as described above, in that they look at a discrete number of operational factors, assign probabilities, co-relations between factors and estimated losses (generally based on extrapolations of historic data) and eventually come up with a single metric (analogous to the “operational risk requirement” of a bank) which is then compared to a pre-set threshold to give a simple binary answer to the "invest / don’t invest" or "remain invested / divest" question.