One of the most notable advances in risk management across all three financial services sectors is the growing emphasis on developing a firm-wide assessment of risk. This constitutes the first trend in the Joint Forum’s report. Improvements in technology and telecommunications have made it easier for firms to gather, collect, and analyse large amounts of data on their exposures and business activities efficiently and increasingly in near “real time.” To make the best use of firm-wide data, some organisations have established a dedicated risk management function to foster more highly integrated and systematic approaches to risk measurement and management. The risk management function typically promotes the use of common risk measures across business lines. It can then report the firm-wide risk data to senior management. Reports may range from daily updates on “value-at-risk” trading positions to regular, if less frequent, compilations of the results of stress testing. The broader use of shared definitions to guide the comprehensive reporting of risk across the firm enables the integrated risk management function to identify concentrations of risk. Concentrations matter particularly when various business lines within the firm have different kinds of exposures to the same counterparty. Comprehensive and consistent reporting helps, moreover, to ensure that the firm is aware of the wide range of risks to which it is exposed; that it understands the relative importance of various risks and how they may interact; and that the firm is less likely to ignore material sources of risk.
Extraordinary growth in practices such as securitisation and in the use of sophisticated derivative products allowed banks to transfer credit risk in ways that the 1988 Accord does not capture. In addition, some banks began to manage their exposures to operational risk separately and as a comprehensive practice comparable to the management of credit or market risk. By the late 1990s, it became increasingly clear to leading banks and their supervisors that the original Accord no longer provided meaningful measures of risk for the most sophisticated banking organisations. As a result, the Basel Committee and others began to discuss ways to revise the existing capital rules to account for these advances. Supervisors sought more than a simple revision of the existing framework. We wanted to align our capital requirements more closely with the best measures of economic risks that banks actually face. We sought furthermore to fortify the stability of the banking sector so that banks could continue to serve as a source of credit through good years and bad. In our view, promoting financial stability will benefit not just banks, but also other businesses and consumers as well. To incorporate the latest advances in risk management, and to develop a more forward-looking approach to supervision, the Committee embraced a “three-pillar” approach to capital requirements. Rather than simply setting out a static minimum requirement for capital levels, the new capital framework will rely on three mutually reinforcing policy approaches.