A bank stress test is an analysis conducted under hypothetical unfavorable economic scenarios, such as a deep recession or financial market crisis, designed to determine whether a bank has enough capital to withstand the impact of adverse economic developments. The importance of robust and rigorous stress testing has moved to the top of the agenda of risk management priorities with many banks having to comply with multiple regulatory regimes i.e. US CCAR & DFA, UK BoE/PRA and ECB/EBA requirements.
In contexts where firms have discretion over the design of scenarios, they must make a large number of subjective decisions around scenario definition. Scenario Stress Testing (SST) allows users to specify hypothetical, historical or regulatory shocks and revalue their portfolio to understand market-market (MTM) loss and changes to counterparty credit exposure. Using Scenario Stress Testing, users can specify shocks to a subset of risk factors which are expanded to all the risk factors in their portfolio through a combination of rules and statistical methods. Banks construct scenarios thus allowing stress testing to be a pro-active process they can use for internal risk and business planning.