What is Financial Stress Testing?
Stress testing is the practice of running a company’s or a bank’s financial model under a deliberately harsh scenario — sharp revenue drop, oil-price crash, currency shock, mass customer default — to see whether it survives. It exposes weaknesses that normal forecasts hide.
How It Works
- Define a baseline forecast, then layer adverse and severely-adverse scenarios on top
- Re-run the income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow under each scenario
- Check capital adequacy, liquidity coverage, and covenant compliance in the worst case
- Identify the actions management would take (cost cuts, capital raise, asset sales)
- Required by regulators for banks; increasingly used by corporates for ERM and treasury planning
Saudi Context
SAMA runs annual stress tests on Saudi banks, modeling oil-price shocks and real-estate corrections. Vision 2030 diversification raises the importance of corporate stress testing too — companies tied to a single sector (oil services, real estate, retail) routinely model demand shocks.
Example
A Saudi mid-sized contractor stress-tests its cash flow against a scenario where two large public-sector clients delay payments by 180 days. The test reveals a SAR 90 million liquidity gap. The CFO arranges a standby credit facility before the risk materializes.