Operations research in credit risk management: models, optimisation techniques and practical applications

Credit-risk decisions combine uncertainty, scarce resources and competing financial objectives, which makes them natural candidates for Operations Research (OR). This structured narrative review consolidates five group reports, comprising fifteen article reviews of fourteen distinct studies published between 2006 and 2026. The studies cover portfolio-loss simulation, dependence and tail risk, robust and dynamic investment, loan pricing, large-scale loan selection, collateral allocation and one related bank-service application. They are classified by decision problem, compared on objectives, constraints and solution methods, and linked to the B.Sc. Finance OR syllabus. Three tensions emerge: realistic dependence against simplified portfolio assumptions, exact solutions against computational feasibility, and model complexity against empirical validation. The findings favour matching the method to the decision. All numerical results are attributed to the original studies; no independent replication was performed.