Description

A focused course, tailored for you

The Regional Bank Risk Specialist Operational Loss Workbench

Build the loss-event intake, root-cause coding, and capital-feed pack a regional-bank Risk Specialist owns end to end.

You code a loss event. Three weeks later the quarterly committee asks you to defend the root-cause column and the recovery memo. The auditor picks the thinnest line. The Risk Specialist who can defend every column in every event from intake to capital feed is the one who moves up. This course is the workbench.

$199 one-time

Tailored to your situation. Access within 24 hours. 30-day money-back.

Includes a hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access, generated for your specific situation.

Why this course

Regional-bank Risk Specialists sit at the intake end of operational risk. Every loss event, every near-miss, every control-failure memo crosses your desk first. The job has gotten harder this quarter because the standardised-approach capital feed now ingests your loss data directly, the OCC has tightened its expectations around root-cause coding, and the line-of-business risk officers want a KRI pack they can actually escalate on. Most Risk Specialists learn this work by absorption, two years of watching what their senior catches at review. There is no public playbook for it. This course is that playbook, written for the specialist who owns the artefact, not the manager who signs it off.

What you walk away with

Code any loss event to the correct Basel operational-risk category and defend the choice in writing.
Write a control-failure narrative that survives both the line-of-business challenge and the second-line review.
Produce a capital-feed reconciliation that ties loss data to the standardised-approach business indicator without manual fudge.
Build a KRI pack the line-of-business risk officer can escalate on, with threshold logic the committee accepts.
Author the quarterly committee one-pager that names root cause, recovery, control remediation, and capital impact in four defensible paragraphs.

The 12 modules

Module 1. The loss-event intake form, line by line

Walk every field on a regional-bank loss-event intake form and the judgment call behind each one. Event date versus discovery date. Gross loss versus net loss. Recovery booked versus recovery expected. Boundary events between operational and credit. The worked example is a wire-fraud event where the discovery-date convention changes the capital impact by two reporting cycles, and the documentation that defends each choice.

Module 2. The seven Basel operational-risk event types as a coding tree

Internal fraud, external fraud, employment practices, clients products and business practices, damage to physical assets, business disruption and system failures, execution delivery and process management. The course teaches the decision tree that a Risk Specialist walks when the event sits between two categories. Worked examples drawn from real regional-bank loss libraries, including the cases that auditors most frequently re-code.

Module 3. Root-cause coding the OCC will accept

Process, people, systems, external events is the standard rubric. The course teaches how to combine them, when to name a secondary cause, and how to write the supporting narrative so the OCC examiner does not send the event back for re-coding. Includes the five most common re-coding patterns the OCC has flagged in regional-bank exams over the last three exam cycles.

Module 4. The control-failure narrative

When a loss event reaches second-line review, the control-failure narrative is what is read. The course teaches a four-paragraph structure: control identification, design versus operating effectiveness, failure mode, remediation commitment. Worked examples include three narratives that were initially rejected by the line of business and rewritten to pass. The student writes one narrative for a worked event and red-lines two.

Module 5. Recovery and insurance booking

Recovery booked versus recovery expected drives the net-loss number that flows to capital. Insurance recoveries have their own timing rules. The course walks the booking decisions a Risk Specialist makes when the recovery is partial, contested, or dependent on a counterparty action. Includes the GL-feed reconciliation step that the controller will challenge if the booking decision is undocumented.

Module 6. The standardised-approach capital feed

Under the standardised approach for operational risk, the business-indicator component pulls directly from your loss data. The course walks the data path from event in the loss library to line item in the capital calculation. Where the feed breaks. What gets manually adjusted. The reconciliation a Risk Specialist owns before the capital team locks the quarterly number. Includes the exception log a regulator will request.

Module 7. Near-miss and boundary-event handling

Near-misses do not hit capital but they drive the KRI pack and the committee narrative. Boundary events sit between operational risk and credit risk, and the line-of-business will fight to push them to the other side. The course teaches the documentation that protects the operational-risk side of the boundary, and the near-miss taxonomy a regional-bank committee will accept as a leading indicator.

Module 8. KRI design and threshold logic

Key risk indicators are only useful if the threshold is set somewhere a line-of-business officer would act. The course teaches the four-step threshold design: baseline, volatility band, action level, escalation level. Worked examples cover transaction-processing exceptions, payment-rejection rates, vendor-incident counts, and access-recertification overdue counts. The student designs three KRIs for a regional-bank portfolio.

Module 9. The KRI escalation memo

When a KRI breaches its action level, the line-of-business risk officer needs a memo that names the cause, the trend, the remediation under way, and the recommendation. The course teaches a one-page format that has been accepted by regional-bank committees, plus the supporting data appendix the auditor will ask for. The student writes a breach memo for a worked threshold breach.

Module 10. The quarterly committee one-pager

Every quarter the committee reads a one-page operational-risk summary. Top losses, top KRI breaches, control remediation status, capital impact. The course teaches the four-paragraph structure that a regional-bank committee will sign off without re-drafting. Worked examples drawn from real committee packs, with the red-lines that the chief risk officer applied before sign-off.

Module 11. Audit and exam readiness for the Risk Specialist

Internal audit will pull a sample of loss events and trace every artefact. The OCC examiner will do the same in a horizontal exam. The course teaches what to keep, where to keep it, how to name the file, and how to walk an examiner through a single loss event from intake to capital line in fifteen minutes. Includes the three documentation gaps regional-bank exams most often flag.

Module 12. The career artefact: your loss-event playbook

By module twelve the student assembles a personal loss-event playbook covering intake template, coding decision tree, control-failure narrative template, recovery booking checklist, capital-feed reconciliation, KRI pack template, escalation memo template, and committee one-pager. This is the artefact a Senior Risk Specialist or VP Operational Risk hiring committee will recognise as proof the work has been done.

How this addresses your situation

Specific modules that map to what you said you are dealing with.

Tuesday morning loss-event intake review with the line of business.

Quarterly capital-feed reconciliation with the treasury and capital team.

Monthly KRI threshold-breach escalation to the line-of-business risk officer.

Quarterly operational-risk committee read-out with the chief risk officer in the room.

What you get with this course

Twelve text-based modules in the Art of Service learning environment.
Downloadable loss-event intake template, Basel coding decision tree, and control-failure narrative template.
Downloadable capital-feed reconciliation worksheet and KRI threshold-design workbook.
Worked examples drawn from regional-bank loss libraries and committee packs.
Hand-built implementation playbook tuned to the buyer's portfolio mix and committee cadence.

What you will have in hand by Day 1, Week 1, Month 1

Within 24 hours the learning environment account is provisioned and the implementation playbook is delivered alongside it.

Module 1 to 4 covered in the first week. Loss-event intake, Basel coding, root-cause, control-failure narrative.

Module 5 to 8 covered in the second week. Recovery booking, capital feed, near-miss and boundary, KRI design.

Module 9 to 12 covered in the third week. KRI escalation, committee one-pager, audit readiness, the career playbook artefact.

Before and after

Before

You code loss events, write narratives, and submit the KRI pack, but you cannot defend a single artefact to the OCC examiner or the committee chair without your senior in the room. Promotion to Senior Risk Specialist is gated on this exact capability.

After

You walk an examiner through any loss event in fifteen minutes, defend the root-cause coding in writing, reconcile the capital feed without manual fudge, and present the committee one-pager without your senior catching anything at red-line.

What happens if you do not address this

The regional-bank operational-risk function is consolidating around specialists who can defend the full artefact stack. The Risk Specialists who absorb the work over three to five years stay at the intake end. The ones who learn it systematically move into senior specialist and VP roles within eighteen months. The capital-feed change has compressed that timeline because the work is now visible to the capital team and the regulators in a way it was not before.

Who it is for

Risk Specialist at a regional or super-regional US bank. Sits in the first or second line operational risk function. Owns loss-event intake, root-cause coding under the Basel operational-risk categories, control-failure narratives, KRI threshold monitoring, and the data feeds that flow up to the capital calculation. Reports to a Senior Risk Specialist or VP Operational Risk. Three to seven years in. Wants to be the person the committee trusts to defend the numbers without coaching from the senior.

Who this is NOT for. Not for Operational Risk VPs who already own the committee read-out. Not for model-risk specialists working on CCAR/DFAST stress. Not for credit-risk analysts. Not for compliance officers focused on AML or fair-lending. Specifically for the Risk Specialist who codes the loss events and owns the artefacts that flow into capital and committee.

How it arrives

Text-based course in the Art of Service learning environment, plus downloadable templates and worked examples for every module, plus the hand-built implementation playbook delivered alongside course access.

Time investment. Six to eight hours total reading time across the twelve modules. Two to three additional hours per module to apply the templates to your own portfolio. Three weeks at a sustainable pace.

Why $199 is the right number

GARP and PRMIA cover operational risk at the framework level but not at the artefact level a regional-bank Risk Specialist owns. Risk Management Association courses cover credit risk far more deeply than operational. Internal bank training is patchy and centred on the senior risk officer audience. This course is written for the specialist who codes the event and owns the document, not the VP who signs the committee pack.

FAQ

Does this map to a specific regulatory framework?

Yes. The coding tree maps to the seven Basel operational-risk event types. The capital-feed module maps to the standardised approach for operational risk. The audit-readiness module maps to OCC horizontal-exam expectations on regional banks.

Is this for first-line or second-line Risk Specialists?

Both. The artefacts a Risk Specialist owns are largely the same in either line. The course flags the three modules where the first-line and second-line viewpoints diverge and walks both.

What if my bank uses the basic approach to operational-risk capital, not the standardised approach?

Module six covers both. The data path differs but the Risk Specialist's reconciliation work is the same. The implementation playbook delivered with the course is tuned to your bank's actual approach.

Do I get a certificate?

Yes, an Art of Service completion certificate covering twelve modules of operational-risk artefact work. It is not a regulatory designation. It is evidence the work has been done.

30-day money-back guarantee. If after a week of working through the materials this is not what you needed, reply to the receipt email and a full refund is processed. No questions, no forms.

Within 24 hours your account in the learning environment is provisioned and the tailored implementation playbook is delivered alongside it.