SR 11-7 Supervisory Guidance on Model Risk Management was issued by the Federal Reserve + OCC in 2011 and remains the defining framework for model risk at US banks. Every bank with models that drive regulatory capital, credit decisions, pricing, or AML scoring has to run three distinct workstreams: development, validation, and ongoing monitoring — with independence between them.
The annual validation cycle is where teams feel the weight. For a Tier-1 or Tier-2 bank with 200+ material models, the validation team needs to rotate through a subset each year, producing validation memos that cover conceptual soundness, outcomes analysis, process verification, and ongoing monitoring for each model. Findings are tiered, action plans are tracked, and the board gets a summary. Miss a validation cycle and the OCC has something to write up on the next exam.
The unglamorous truth: most banks run this in Word documents, Excel inventories, and SharePoint folders. Validation memos live in Word, tier assignments live in Excel, evidence lives in SharePoint, findings track in another spreadsheet, board reporting gets assembled from PowerPoint. The lift to produce one coherent cycle view costs hundreds of hours across the year.
The Banking pack collapses this into one workflow. Model inventory + tier + materiality in one register. Validation memo template per model with structured sections and evidence attachments. Findings tagged to models + remediation workflows with SLA clocks. Board pack generation that rolls the whole quarter into a formatted PDF. Plus parallel workstreams for DORA ICT resilience + TLPT, Basel III capital + market risk, SOX ITGC, BSA/AML KYC + sanctions, and FFIEC / OCC / Fed examination prep.
If you have ever spent the last two weekends before a validation committee assembling slides from spreadsheets, you know the problem. The solution is not a better template — it is having the validation cycle live in structured data from day one.