Where to from here?

Editor Victoria Tozer-Pennington reviews the op risk events from the month that range from volcanic ash clouds to civil fraud.

After coping with the worst financial crisis for a hundred years, we now have to contend with giant ash clouds. Admittedly the volcanic eruption in Iceland and subsequent grounding of all flights in and out of European airspace hasn’t adversely affected financial services firms too much so far. But it does pose some strong reminders that black swan events – or ‘black ash events’ as ING’s Panagiotis Tsaoussis has dubbed them – do happen. Scenario libraries do not contain this type of event, but