A New Proposal for Collection and Generation of Information on Financial Institutions' Risk: the case of derivatives

This article aims at providing a new alternative for the collection of information on risks taken by financial institutions, which enables the calculation of risk tools usually used in risk management, such as VaR and stress tests. This approach should help risk managers, off-site supervision and academics in assessing the potential risks in financial institutions principally due to derivatives positions. The basic idea, for linear financial instruments, like the traditionally used by the management risk systems, is to reduce positions in risk factors and then mapping by vertices. For the nonlinear financial instruments all of the positions in different types of options – European, Americans, exotic, etc.– are represented as plain vanilla European options or replicated by portfolios of plain vanilla European options. The methodology was applied to Brazil, within the worst scenarios during the period from 1994 to 2004, and the paper demonstrates that the proposed approach captured the risks satisfactorily in the analyzed portfolios, including the risk existent in the strategies involving options, given an accepted error margin. This approach could be useful for regulators, risk managers; financial institutions and risk management modeling as it can be used as an input in general risk management models.