Operational Risk Management: A Stochastic Control Framework with Preventive and Corrective Controls

Financial services firms are subject to various types of risks. In particular, operational risk is difficult to assess and can be devastating, although it is often perceived by a firm's management as being more controllable than the cost of managing other types of risks. Understanding the management problems associated with operational risk is crucial to the performance of the firm. In “Operational Risk Management: A Stochastic Control Framework with Preventive and Corrective Controls,” Xu, Zhu, and Pinedo introduce a general modeling framework for operational risk management for financial firms. They propose two types of controls and characterize the optimal control policies. They apply their model to a data set from a commercial bank, and through a proper investment strategy, one can achieve a significant performance improvement.