The application of VaR techniques is usually limited to assessing the risks being run
in banks’ treasury or trading operations (such as securities, foreign exchange and
equities trading). It is rarely only applied to the measurement of the exposure to the
interest-rate and foreign-exchange risks that arise from more traditional non-traded
banking business (for example, lending and deposit taking). Use of VaR by
Australian banks ranges from a fully integrated approach (where VaR is central to
the measurement and internal reporting of traded market risk and VaR-based limits
are set for each individual trader) to an approach where reliance is placed on other
techniques and VaR is calculated only for the information of senior management or
annual reporting requirements. At this stage, it is most common to see VaR used to
aggregate exposures arising from different areas of a bank’s trading activities while
individual traders manage risk based on simpler, market-specific risk measures.