KnowledgeBank
When handling our money, the three largest risks banks take are credit risk, market risk and operational risk.
Sound like jargon? Think of it this way: you have £100 pounds. You lend £20 to a friend, invest £50 in Bitcoin and leave the rest in your pocket.
Remember your friend who “forgot” to pay you back… two years ago?
People and companies who fail to pay back their debts pose the largest risk to banks. When lending money to someone, there’s always a chance they won’t pay you back. This is credit risk.
Banks have ways of reducing this risk. When you apply for a loan, the lender will look at what’s known as the five C’s: credit history, capacity, collateral, capital and conditions.
You invested £50 in Bitcoin. What happens next? The price could drop and leave your investment worthless. This is market risk.
Investment banks are particularly exposed to risks from changes in financial markets. This is because they hold more financial assets such as shares and bonds for themselves and their customers.
Market risk can for example come from a change in interest rates, the price of a good or the exchange rate of a currency. Banks that have bought shares in an oil company will for example lose money, if global oil prices suddenly go down.
The last £30? Turns out you should probably have fixed that hole in your pocket.
All banks are to an extent vulnerable to human errors or mistakes. In business terms, this is called operational risk. It comes from the losses a bank might make from bad internal processes, people or external events. This could for example be confidential information getting leaked or a badly judged decision by an employee.
The losses from operational risk can be huge. British banks have had to pay around £30 billion for mis-selling payment protection insurance (PPI) over the last decade. Customers were sold the insurance despite in many cases not being eligible for or needing it. It was designed to cover debt repayments in certain circumstances when the customer was unable to pay, for example because of illness, losing their job or death.
Of course then Arnold Schwarzenegger came along.
FCA PPI campaign deadline 60 second TV advert
