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There is a gap linking organisational risk profiles to real people. Yet people are core to all risk/reward decisions, both at an organisational and a personal level. If an organisation is the aggregate of the decisions made by its people, how can aggregation be carried out sensibly; how can concordance between the organisational risk/reward profile and its people’s be ensured; what tools might help? The paper concludes with suggestions for areas of potentially fruitful research into how personal risk/reward profiles can be assessed and analysed to inform organisational risk/reward decisions.

Banks are often smug about their management of risk. Smugness may well be justified for market and credit risks, but banks can learn much from industry about managing operational risk. In order to manage operational risk, industry has evolved enterprise risk/reward management systems which coordinate an internal market for risk with variations to capital charges. Industry has at least three lessons to teach banks: use activity‐based costing variances to quantify operational risk; link operational risk to external prices via an enterprise risk/reward management system; and establish measures to govern an enterprise risk/reward unit.

The use of a deterministic numeric paradigm in auditing and accounting may well be the root cause of many current problems. This paper argues that risk‐based accounting methods should start using probabilistic inputs which would show resultant distributions as output. “Stochastic accounting” would better inform users of financial information. Although this recommendation would change the way accounts were produced and presented, it would lead to more usable financial information.