Beyond Boundaries: The AHP-DEA Model for Holistic Cross-Banking Operational Risk Assessment

Abstract

Operational risk assessment has received considerable attention in bank risk management. However, current assessment methods are primarily designed to assess the risk profile of individual banks. To enable cross-bank operational risk assessment, we propose an integrated AHP-DEA (analytic hierarchy process–data envelopment analysis) method. This method determines the importance of assessment criteria by calculating the weighted sum of rank votes after obtaining the importance values for specific rankings with DEA. This procedure replaces the pairwise comparisons in AHP and addresses the challenge of traditional AHPs in determining appropriate importance values when dealing with a large number of indicators. We applied this method to assess the operational risks of three Chinese commercial banks, and the empirical results indicate that this integrated AHP-DEA method is simple and user-friendly, making it suitable for cross-bank operational risk assessment.