PRM Certification 8010 Passing Score

Choice 'a' is the correct answer. Refer to the detailed loss event type classification under Basel II (see Annex 9 of the accord). You should know the exact names of all loss event types, and examples of each.

Statement I is correct. Retail Risk Based Pricing (RRBP) involves the use of borrower specific data (such as FICO scores, average balances etc) to arrive at credit decisions. These 'retail' credit decisions may include decisions on whether to grant a line of credit, a mortgage, issue a credit card, or any of the various other retail activities abank may be dealing with. At the same time, this data can also be used to price the product, in addition to providing a yes or no credit decision so that risky borrowers are charged more than less risky borrowers.

Statement II is not correct, because an integrated Risk Information Management Environment includes three elements - people, processes and technology (and not just people and processes).

Statement III is correct. An LDM is a blue print of an organization's data, and describes the relationships between the various data elements.

Statement IV is not correct because reference data and metadata are not the same thing. Reference data refers to relatively static data, such as customer name (while actual transactions may not be so static). Metadata refers to data about data, and is stored in a data dictionary.

Therefore Choice 'b' is the correct answer and the rest are incorrect.

While conceptually VaR is a fairly straightforward concept, a number of decisions need to be made to select between the different choices available for the exact mechanism to be used for the calculations.

The Basel framework requires banks toestimate VaR at the 99% confidence level over a 10 day horizon. Yet this is a decision that needs to be explicitly made and documented. Therefore 'I' is a correct choice.

At various stages of the calculations, portfolio values need to be determined. The valuation can be done using a 'full valuation', where each position is explicitly valued; or the portfolio(s) can be reduced to a handful of risk factors, and risk sensitivities such as delta, gamma, convexity etc be used to value the portfolio. The decisionbetween the two approaches is generally based on computational efficiency, complexity of the portfolio, and the degree of exactness desired. 'II' therefore is one of the decisions that needs to be made.

The decision as to disclosing the VaR in financial filings comes after the VaR has been calculated, and is unrelated to the VaR calculation system a bank needs to set up. 'III' is therefore not a correct answer.

Though the Basel framework requires a 10-day VaR to be calculated, it also allows the calculation of the 1-day VaR and and scaling it to 10 days using the square root of time rule. The bank needs to decide whether it wishes to scale the VaR based on a 1-day VaR number, or compute VaR for a 10 day period to begin with. 'IV' therefore is a decision tobe made for setting up the VaR system.

A PRNG (pseudorandom number generators of the kind included in statistical packages and Excel) is used to generate random numbers that are not correlated with each other, ie they are random. A Markov process is a stochastic model that depends only upon its current state. Simulation underlies many financial calculations. None of these directly relate to generating correlated multivariate normal random numbers. That job is done utilizing a Cholesky decomposition of the correlation matrix.

Specifically, a Cholesky decomposition involves the factorization of the correlation matrix into a lower triangular matrix (a square matrix all of whose entries above the diagonal are zero) and its transpose. This can then be combined with random numbers to generate a set of correlated normal random numbers. This technique is used for calculating Monte Carlo VaR.