Operational Risk in Finance: A Quick Start for Managers

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most of the big losses in financial services don’t come from a bad bet on the market. They come from a process that failed, a system that went down, or a person who made a mistake. That is operational risk, and if you manage people, processes or systems in a financial firm, you are already managing it.

This short course gives managers a practical start. In about 35 minutes you will learn what operational risk is and why it lands on your desk, where it concentrates in your firm’s business model, the seven ways things go wrong (with real cases), how to separate cause, event and impact, and what your own reactions teach your team about risk.

You follow one fictional firm, Halbury Group, as its new payments platform heads for trouble, and two short quizzes help you check your thinking.

It is the first module of the full course, Operational Risk in Financial Institutions for Managers. The full course is available separately and goes on to cover governance and risk appetite, assessing risks and controls, early-warning indicators, incidents and root causes, and operational risk across the life of a transaction. It also adds downloadable tools and AI role plays, which are not part of this short course.

It is for managers and team leads in banks, investment firms, insurers, payment and crypto-asset firms. No risk background is needed. Your instructor, Vlad Karols, is a Certified Internal Auditor who leads compliance in regulated crypto-asset and e-money firms.

AI disclosure: some lectures are presented by an AI avatar of the instructor, and the Halbury characters are fictional and AI-generated.