Risk and Controls
This investment bank is required by regulators to assess their risk and controls on a quarterly basis. This is a very labor intensive process, as there are more than 5,000 controls that have to be assessed independently.
In the process of building an ontology of financial risks and controls, we discovered that while everyone “knows” what risks and controls are, the act of creating formal definitions for these core concepts shone a light on the fact that there were multiple definitions of risk and control that were being used interchangeably. We were able to build a very rigorous ontology in the area, and gained agreement on what all their terms meant, and how they mapped to current concepts.
As far as we know they haven’t yet incorporated this into their evaluation systems, but they have the materials they need to should they choose.
