20 Mar How not to be the next SVB
"“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”" These lines, from Ernest Hemingway's The...
Insights
01 Mar Managing Liquidity Risk and Funding Costs During a Crisis
On HBO’s The Last of Us, much of humanity has been zombified by a fungus that spreads like, er, a...
12 Jan After a challenging 2022, will this year be any better?
After three years of pandemics, bear markets and war, what on earth could 2023 have in store? Anyone who tells...
08 Nov Data-Driven Capital & Liquidity Planning
An AI-powered tool-set for the C-suite and senior management to enhance and support strategic risk decision-making Download PDF ...
08 Nov Next-Gen Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA) Platform
Bringing the power of machine learning and full-range scenario analysis to Strategic Asset Allocation, Straterix is the first SaaS application...
03 Oct Buffing-up
Do your capital buffers need buffing-up - and if so, by how much? In a market buffeted by extreme events...
23 Aug Strategic Risk: How to Select Critical Future Scenarios
With age, they say, comes wisdom. But when it comes to models, the older they get, the less useful they...
02 Aug Wealth Management: Is It Too Late for Early Warnings?
From politics to punchlines, timing can be everything. The same goes for investment. In an ideal world, wealth managers would...
02 Aug The stagflation challenge: how to future-proof liquidity risk
Cash is king. This may be a cliché, but it also happens to be true. If your balance sheet is...
08 Jun How to Manage Balance-Sheet Risk in Volatile Times
Markets tanking, rates rising, recession looming, Russia's Ukraine invasion ongoing - these are, to put it mildly, volatile times. Against...
02 May The Next Frontier in Risk Management: How to Achieve Digitalization
What do you do if you want to digitalize your risk management processes? For a start, firms need to take...
23 Mar IERM: How to Build a True Risk-Business Partnership
Some of us dream of Olympic glory. Others, of making it big by backing the next meme stock before it...
22 Feb Strategic Asset Allocation
What is Strategic Asset Allocation's problem? It helps investment managers determine how best to spread their investments. But SAA can’t...
24 Jan The pros & cons of Alternative Investments
Alternative investments are all the rage these days. But how do you select an investment strategy that optimally improves the...
24 Jan The Uncertainty of Inflation Risk
Inflation is surging. But just how high will it go, and how long will it endure? The short answer is...
25 Oct The Alternative Data Craze: Peering Behind the Curtain
To enhance returns, develop dynamic risk limits and beat competition, asset managers and hedge funds are increasingly turning to alternative...
27 Sep How effective are your Scenarios?
Many business functions use automatically generated scenarios for pricing, hedging, and meeting regulatory and accounting requirements. These scenarios are generated...
02 Sep What’s Missing in Asset and Liability Management?
Quite a bit, as it happens. Traditional Asset & Liability Management (ALM) assumes deterministic levels of assets and liabilities and focuses on...
26 Jul How to Stress Test for Extremely Unexpected Scenarios
Like reality TV or Marmite, surprises aren’t to everyone’s taste. Sometimes they’re nasty (like the pandemic and the lockdowns it...
21 Jun Synthetic Data: the Risk Manager’s New Gold, and How to Mine It
Like animal-friendly faux fur coats, synthetic data is manufactured - artificially created rather than resulting from actual events. It’s having...
10 Jun machine learning for strategic decision-making
How can you use machine learning for Strategic Decision Making in finance? This was the subject of Straterix CEO Alla...
24 May Risky Driving
Pre-pandemic, life was pretty simple: work was from an office, pajamas were for bedtime, and revenue projections of financial institutions...
29 Apr Risk management in a sea of unknown unknowns
"There are known knowns...
05 Apr Come with me if you want to remain solvent
The Terminator movie franchise left us with many memorable quotes, but the one from the unborn John Conner, relaed by...
17 Mar The art of the probable
On the surface, there’s a singular purpose behind the introduction of stress testing: ensure that the next unprecedented crisis doesn’t...
17 Mar Credit-Loss Forecasting: A Practical Guide to CECL
The COVID-19 crisis found most financial models wanting. In response, modelers panicked: what models, and how many of them, were now...
12 Feb Post COVID-19 Scenario Planning lecture
The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage globally. Vaccination campaigns have injected some much needed optimism, but they’ve also prompted thoughts...
25 Jan Cyborg model validation
Like the Titanic being unsinkable, banks' models were meant to be unbreakable - able to withstand any scenario. They'd been...
15 Jan Status Update: Funded
Pensions have never been especially exciting. Usually, it takes a crisis, like a company collapsing and retirees being deprived of...
16 Nov Risky business: why existing models don’t work
“Prediction,” said the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, “is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.” Within these pages, we’ve...
26 Oct Putting Stress Tests in the Blender
We're delighted to share that our CEO, Alla Gil, is the new FRM Corner columnist at the Global Association of...
09 Oct What to Do When Black Swans Invade
In these crazy days, it can sometimes seem like one-in-a-hundred-year events are happening every five years (of course, as long...
15 Sep When Covid Moves the Risk Goalposts
Imagine running-up to take a penalty, only for the goalposts to move just as you’re about to kick the ball....
09 Sep Three Investment Lessons From the COVID Crisis
Equities, bonds and cash. This is the holy trinity of assets where investment managers stash most of their money. They...
17 Aug How Fed Stress Tests Helped Prep the U.S. For COVID
They sent chills down the spines of every big bank CEO, forcing some of the most storied names on Wall...
06 Aug If You Don’t Like Surprises, Avoid Them
The past six months have been full of surprises, ranging from the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, to massive government intervention...
09 Jul Herd Immunity: Why Stocks Keep Rising (Despite COVID-19)
Have the markets gone mad? After the COVID crash - prompted by the “Great Shutdown” rather than than the pandemic...
02 Jul How to Make Fed Stress Tests Pandemic-Proof
Stale, confusing and little more than a compliance exercise designed to enable banks to continue paying dividends - that’s how...
25 Jun Wall Street’s Pandemic Stress Test
Totally outdated. That’s how the U.S. Federal Reserve must now feel about February’s bank stress tests - within weeks, the...
18 Jun Thought Predicting the Pandemic Was Hard? Try Predicting the Response
The precise timing and severity of a pandemic is impossible to predict: there is no Minority Report-style “pre-pandemic”, where genetically-blessed...
09 Jun What’s in a Scenario?
Last week, we discussed how our algorithms factor in new, unprecedented scenarios, such as COVID-19. But which particular variables have...
26 May Predicting the Pandemic
Last month we wrote about the massive upheaval caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and how financial institutions must quickly find...
04 Apr COVID-19 Calls for New Risk Measure
Read our CEO's article - COVID-19 Calls for New Risk Measures, which was published on April 3, 2020 in the...
18 Mar An Extraordinary Scenario Calls for Extraordinary Measures
TRADITIONAL STRESS TESTS ARE AT BEST USELESS; AT WORST, THEY COULD BE DEVASTATING The markets are in turmoil. Economies are being shut...
02 Mar Corona virus outbreak – It’s not too late to act
Coronavirus caused a tremendous market turbulence. Everyone was expecting a crisis - is this it? Could it just be a...
27 Feb The Libor Dilemma: How to Manage and Mitigate the Risks of a Tough Transition (copy)
Read our CEO's article that was published in GARP on February 27, 2020. View on Garp ...
10 Dec How Risk Managers Can Most Effectively Apply AI
Read our CEO Alla Gil's take on the effective use of AI in Risk Management, as published on GARP ...
07 Oct How to Account for Tail Risk in Wealth Management
Our CEO Alla Gil's insights about considering tail-risks in wealth management, as published by GARP ...
25 Sep Balance Sheet Optimization
Balance sheet optimization has been the Holy Grail of companies’ management for many years now. But to quote Fintekminds on...
10 Sep What Should Keep You Up At Night
The surprise of executives at a mortgage bank was big when confronted with the most threatening scenario for their ALM....
25 Aug Diving Deeper Into CECL
Read our CEO's article about The Best Strategy...
29 Apr A Proactive, Integrated Approach to Capital Planning
Read our CEO Alla Gil's take on how to reduce costs and increase efficiency: practical steps...
16 Aug The Difference Between a Chess Game and a Financial Crisis
If AI is so much better than humans in chess, can it also save the world in the next crisis?...