8010 PRMIA Operational Risk Manager (ORM) Exam Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

Pre-settlement risk is the risk that one of the counterparties defaults prior to the date for the maturity of the transaction in question. This may be an unrelated default, in fact there may have been no default on that particular contract, but the party may have defaulted on its other obligations, or filed for bankruptcy. To deal with such cases and to protect the interests of both the parties, it is common toprovide for immediate termination of positions and settlement based on the current replacement value of the contracts. Therefore statements I and II are correct.

Statement III is correct as well - the exposure from an OTC derivative contract derives fromits current replacement value, and not the notional. If the current replacement value is negative, then the credit exposure is considered equal to zero.

Statement IV is correct as it is quite common to restate all exposures - those from credit lines, OTC derivatives etc - in loan equivalent terms prior to estimating credit risk.

Choice 'b', Choice 'c' and Choice 'a' correctly describe a bilateral close out netting as recommended by the ISDA. However Choice 'd' is not correct as it suggests individual settlement of transactions without netting which is the whole pointof bilateral close out netting.

Incremental VaR is the change in portfolio VaR resulting from a change in a single position. This is accurately described by VaR_(p+a) - VaR_p. The other answers are incorrect, and describe other concepts.

It is important to know and understand the ideas behind MVaR (marginal VaR), CVaR (component VaR) and iVaR (incremental VaR), and the differences between them.

One way to think about this question is this: we are provided with two pieces of information: if the portfolio is worth $100 to start with, it will be worth $95 at the end of year 1 and $85 at the end of year 2. What it isasking for is the probability of default in year 2, for the debts that have survived year 1. This probability is $10/$95 = 10.53%. Choice 'b' is the correct answer.

Note that marginal probabilities of default are the probabilities for default for a given period, conditional on survival till the end of the previous period. Cumulative probabilities of default are probabilities of default by a point in time, regardless of when the default occurs. If the marginal probabilities of default for periods 1, 2... n are p1, p2...pn, then cumulative probability of default can be calculated as Cn = 1 - (1 - p1)(1-p2)...(1-pn). For this question, we can calculate the probability of default for year 2 as [1 - (1 - 5%)(1 - 10.53%)] = 15%.

According to the Basel II framework, Tier 1 capital, also called core capital or basic equity, includes equity capital and disclosed reserves.

Tier 2 capital, also called supplementary capital, includes undisclosed reserves, revaluation reserves, general provisions/general loan-loss reserves, hybrid debt capital instruments and subordinated term debt issued originally for 5 years or longer.

Tier 3 capital, or short term subordinated debt, is intended only to cover market risk but only at the discretion of their national authority. This only includes short term subordinated debt originally issued for 2 or more years.

An interesting thing to note is the difference between 'subordinated term debt' under Tier 2 and the 'short term subordinated debt' under Tier 3. The distinction is based upon the years to maturity at the time the debt was issued. The remaining time to maturity is not relevant. For the subordinated term debt included under Tier 2, the amount that can be counted towards capital is reduced by 20% for every year when the debt is due within 5 years. This takes care of the time to maturity problem for Tier 2subordinated debt. For Tier 3 short term subordinated debt, this is not an issue because debt will only qualify for Tier 3 if it has a lock-in clause stipulating that the debt is not required to be repaid if the effect of such repayment is to take the bank below minimum capital requirements.

Credit reserves are created in respect of expected losses, which are considered the cost of doing business. Unexpected losses are borne by economic credit capital, which is a part of economic capital. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

For EVT, we use the block maxima or the peaks-over-threshold methods. These provide us the data points that can be fitted to a GEVdistribution.

Least squares and maximum likelihood are methods that are used for curve fitting, and they have a variety of applications across risk management.

A computation of Altman's Z-score considers the following ratios:

- Working capital to total assets

- Retained earnings to total assets

- EBIT to total assets

- Market cap to debt

- Sales to total assets

It does not consider Net Income to total assets, therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer. This makes sense as net income is after interest and taxes, both of which are not relevant for considering the cash flows for debt servicing.

A LIBOR based loan requires cash to move from the lenderto the borrower in the amount of the notional. The Overnight Index Swap requires only the exchange of interest payments, and therefore represents less risk.

Therefore the LIBOR based loan is a riskier exposure.

The LIBOR is generally higher than the OIS. In fact, the difference between the two, the LIBOR-OIS spread, is a standard measure of the risk premium in the market that goes up when the risk of default by counterparty banks is considered high. This is because when the market perceives the risk of default to be high, the participants need a risk premium to take on the default risk which is considerably lesser with the OIS.

increasing the timing differences between the two legs of the transaction will increase settlement risk and not reduce it. Using escrow arrangements, such as central clearing houses to settle transactions (eg the DTCC in the United States) reduces settlement risk. Cash settlements based on netting arrangements reduce settlement risk, while physical delivery combined with gross cash payments increase it.

Therefore Choice 'a' is the correct answer.

Explanation

If the risks are considered perfectly positively correlated, ie assumed to have a correlation equal to 1, the standard deviations can simply be added together. This gives the most conservative estimate of combined risk forcapital calculation purposes. In practice, this is the assumption used most often.

If risks are uncorrelated, ie correlation is assumed to be zero, variances can be added or the standard deviation is the root of the sum of the squares of the individual standard deviations. This obviously gives a number lower than that given when correlation is assumed to be +1.

Similarly, assumptions of negative correlation, or any correlation other than +1 will give a standard deviation number that is smaller and thereforeless conservative. Choice 'b' is the correct answer.

The difference between the yields oncorporate bonds and the risk free rate is called the corporate bond spread. Widening of the spread means that corporate bonds yield more, and their yield curve shifts upwards, driving down bond prices. The increase in the spread is a consequence of the market risk from holding these interest rate instruments, which is a part of market risk. If the reduction in the value of the portfolio were to be caused by a change in the credit rating of the bonds held, it would have been a loss arising due to credit risk. Counterparty risk and liquidity risk are not relevant for this question. Therefore Choice 'c' is the correct answer.

A bullet bond is a bond that pays coupons covering interest during the life of the bond and theprincipal at maturity. An amortizing loan pays the interest as well as a part of the principal with every payment. Therefore, the exposure of the amortizing loan continually reduces, and approaches zero towards the end of its life. The bullet bond will always have a higher exposure at any time during its life when compared to an equivalent amortizing loan. Hence Choice 'd' is the correct answer.

The current exposure is negative, so there is no immediate credit exposure. However, since the price ofthe derivative is volatile, we can reasonably expect the value to be greater than zero sometime in the future. This is a stochastic variable which will have a distribution, and not just a unique value, in the future that will represent the credit exposure.Since there is no unique value, a conservative approach is to pick a quintile of the distribution, and use that as the future value of the derivative contract, with the assurance that the probability of the credit exposure exceeding that quintile is knownand has been consciously selected. This number can then be converted to a loan equivalent amount for credit risk purposes. Therefore Choice 'b' is the correct answer. Choice 'a', Choice 'd' and Choice 'c' are incorrect for these reasons.

Thedefault correlation between two obligors goes up if the joint probability of default between them increases. This is intuitive. Also consider the formula for the default correlation between two obligors

Default correlation = [P(1,2) - P1 * P2] / √P1*(1-P1)*P2*(1-P2); where P(1,2) is the joint probability of default between the two and P1 and P2 are their individual probabilities of default. Obviously, an increase in P(1,2) will cause the default correlation to increase.

When modeling operational loss frequency distribution (which, for example, may be based upon a Poisson distribution) and a loss severity distribution (for example, based upon a lognormal distribution), it is assumed that the frequency of losses and the severity of the losses are completely independent and do not impact each other. Therefore Choice 'a' is correct, and the others are not validassumptions underlying the operational loss modeling.

Once each of these distributions has been built, a random number is drawn from each to determine a loss scenario. The process is repeated many times as part of a Monte Carlo simulation to get a the lossdistribution.

The key to pricing loans is to make sure that the prices cover expected losses. The correct measure of expected losses is the mean, and not the median. To the extent the median is different from the mean, the loans would be over or underpriced.

The loss curve for credit defaults is a distribution skewed to the right. Therefore its mode is less than its median which is less than its mean. Since the median is less than the mean, the bank is pricing in fewer losses than the mean, which means over the long run it is underestimating risk and underpricing its loans. Therefore Choice 'd' is the correct answer.

If on the other hand for some reason the bank were overpricing risk, its loans would be more expensive than its competitors and it would lose market share. In this case however, this does not apply.Loan pricing decisions are driven by the rate of defaults, and not the other way round, therefore any pricing decisions will not reduce the rate of default.

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.

The CCAR is a supervisory mechanism adopted by the US Federal Reserve Bank to assess capital adequacy for bank holding companies it supervises. Itwas not a concept introduced by the international Basel framework.

The other three were indeed rules introduced by Basel 2.5, which was ultimately subsumed into Basel III.

Stressed VaR is just the standard 99%/10 day VaR, calculated with theassumption that relevant market factors are under stress.

The Incremental Risk Charge (IRC) is an estimate of default and migration risk of unsecuritized credit products in the

trading book. (Though this may sound like a credit risk term, it relates to market risk - for example, a bond rated A being downgraded to BBB. In the old days, the banking book where loans to customers are held was the primary source of credit risk, but with OTC trading and complex products the trading book also now holds a good dealof credit risk. Both IRC and CRM account for these.)

While IRC considers only non-securitized products, the CRM (Comprehensive Risk Model) considers securitized products such as tranches, CDOs, and correlation based instruments.

The IRC, SVaR and CRMcomplement standard VaR by covering risks that are not included in a standard VaR model. Their results are therefore added to the VaR for capital adequacy determination.