An Indifference Approach to the Cost of Capital Constraints: KVA and Beyond

Abstract

The strengthening of capital requirements has induced banks and traders to consider charging a so called capital valuation adjustment (KVA) to the clients in OTC transactions. This roughly corresponds to charge the clients ex-ante the profit requirement that is asked to the trading desk. In the following we try to delineate a possible way to assess the impact of capital constraints in the valuation of a deal. We resort to an optimisation stemming from an indifference pricing approach, and we study both the linear problem from the point of view of the whole bank and the non-linear problem given by the viewpoint of shareholders. We also consider the case where one optimises the median rather than the mean statistics of the profit and loss distribution.

Keywords: KVA, Capital Constraints, Indifference Pricing, RAROC

JEL Classification: C61, C44, G13, G31