Special Alert : The end of an era
In this issue of The Risk Universe, we ponder the future of operational risk management in its current form, as Mike Finlay’s provocative piece on page 12 asks: as operational risk management comes of age, does it have a future?

The proliferation of risk-related roles in financial institutions since the crisis, perhaps counterproductively, has created a series of over-lapping, contradictive disciplines, some of which arguably swallow up the functions that were commonly filed under operational risk.

The definition of operational risk itself hasn’t helped things, argues Finlay. After credit, market and liquidity, operational risk is often unhelpfully labelled as “everything else.”

Can practitioners continue to manage in this way? And isn’t “everything else” on the risk agenda usually something to do with cyber these days? Perhaps, then, it is the end of operational risk – at least as we know it. But, as practitioners look back at 18 years of the discipline, maybe it will also mark the beginning of a better, more ‘grown-up’ approach to risk management.

Endings are relevant for another reason this month, as we announce that this edition of The Risk Universe will be our last – for now at least. We hope you’ve found our operational risk-focussed viewpoint both useful and enjoyable to read. We will still be providing a dedicated source of industry news through our website, so stay tuned at www.riskuniverse.com and follow us on Twitter @RiskUniverse, for regular updates.

Thanks for reading.

Carrie Cook, Editor