Scenario Development Handbook: Pandemic

In response to the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak, ORX Scenarios have produced a pandemic Scenario Development Handbook to support the development of pandemic scenarios in financial institutions.

This handbook provides practical guidance on preparation, assessment, and governance for pandemic scenarios, summarising the views from recent discussions with the ORX Scenarios community from over 50 institutions across the globe.

ORX Scenarios is a premium service, however to support the financial industry throughout the crisis, we have made the ORX coronavirus resources freely available to all. As well as this handbook, we have many other free resources you can access, including a webinar discussing how to create an operational risk scenario for pandemics.

Key steps of the scenario analysis process

ORX Scenarios subscribers agreed to develop this handbook to set out practical, valuable guidance to support you with the following key steps of the scenario process:

• Preparation – a series of internal and external sources used in preparing the scenario workshop
• Assessment – developing the storyline, risk drivers, estimating the severity of the impacts and frequency
• Governance – who is involved in the scenario workshop and how ownership is assigned

This handbook focuses specifically on pandemic scenarios as a standalone risk (please see the definition reported in Section 2). If your institution refers to the pandemic as a stress on existing scenarios, you may find the “secondary impacts section” (Section 4.5.2) useful. 

We will revisit this handbook later in 2020 with additional updates following further developments with the coronavirus and other pieces of connected work at ORX.

Download the Scenario Development Handbook on pandemics

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Scenarios are a key factor in measuring and managing operational risk across the financial services industry. ORX Scenarios is a unique resource that effectively addresses practitioners’ needs of scenario identification, assessment, quantification and validation practices. You can compare your scenario portfolio and methods against your peers to ensure full coverage of the most relevant scenarios.

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