Fintech firm RiskBusiness has completed the acquisition of the Global Operational Loss Database (GOLD) from partner UK Finance for an undisclosed amount.
RiskBusiness is a provider of governance, risk, audit, compliance, and content Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.
The tech company explains that GOLD offers access to a dataset contributed by an international consortium of financial institutions of different sizes and types, where participants submit their own risk and loss experiences in a pre-defined format at regular intervals into a common data pool. Submitted data is anonymised and then made available to other participants for benchmarking and their own further use.
Mike Finlay, CEO and Chief Product Architect, RiskBusiness, states: “As the regulatory community have recognised that theoretical capital calculation models do not, in of themselves, reduce a firm’s exposure to operational risk, so have firms recognised that there are other uses for external loss data than just for capital modelling purposes. If a firm wishes to manage operational or non-financial risk within its risk appetite, then it needs to be able to benchmark and measure itself against its peers in the industry.”
GOLD, which was established in 2000, is provided to participants as an online forum, through which the database can be accessed.
Additional tools include the KRI Library, containing in excess of 2,500 specifications of key risk and control indicators or metrics; and the Newsflash Library, a set of over 50,000 publicly disclosed losses classified in a common manner to the core GOLD data.
GOLD is not just for UK Finance members as others can use it.
RiskBusiness has worked with UK Finance (and its predecessor the British Bankers Association) since 2010 and provided content collected via its Loss Data Consortium Service, a sub-module within RiskBusiness’ Graci platform. In addition to UK Finance, the Loss Data Consortium Service also supports the ORIC (re)insurance loss data consortium.
RiskBusiness has established a product strategy and roadmap for ‘GOLD by RiskBusiness’ which will be shared with the consortium members over the next few months and which will see a range of additional risk intelligence capabilities become available to GOLD participants.
The fintech company was founded in 2003 and has principal locations in Birmingham, London, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, New York, Singapore, Toronto and Zurich.
