GARP Risk Podcast

In this podcast, Julie Muckleroy, Global Banking Strategist from SAS, and Abraham Izquierdo, Managing Director of Trading and Treasury Risks at Grupo Financiero Banorte, explore the top risk management trends for 2024.

With the start of 2024, persistent high interest rates and inflation remain key concerns. Adding to these challenges are potential conflict escalation in the Middle East, threats to global shipping lanes, and historically low water levels in Panama, among others.

The fallout from the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the rapid growth of Generative AI are also being analyzed, impacting both smaller financial institutions' balance sheets in the U.S. and the wider financial landscape.

Speakers’ Bios:

Abraham M Izquierdo, FRM: Managing Director of Trading & Treasury Risks at Grupo Financiero Banorte, overseeing balance sheet oversight, policy compliance, hedging strategies, and interest rate risk management. He also manages liquidity risk framework and the Basel III directive, as well as capital management and surveillance for Grupo Financiero Banorte.

Julie Muckleroy: Global Banking Strategist in SAS’ Global Industry Marketing organization. With a background in marketing leadership roles at SaaS organizations and large US banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo, Julie brings extensive knowledge and expertise in global banking trends and marketing strategies. She evaluates the future state of banking as a strategist at SAS.

Over the years, GARP and SAS have partnered to bring risk practitioners unique insights on a variety of topics related to risk management. Now we present a series of podcasts focused on making financial risk-based decisions in light of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Learn more of the trends shaping the banking sector in 2024: The Year Ahead: Bank Trends for 2024

About SAS

As a leader in analytics, SAS’ award-winning capabilities in analytics, risk management, and other technology areas have helped customers across the globe solve their toughest and ever-evolving business problems. Its unrelenting commitment to innovation enables organizations across financial services to modernize and sustain a competitive edge. Through the latest developments in machine learning, natural language processing, forecasting, and optimization, SAS supports diverse environments and scales to meet changing needs. Learn more about how SAS is driving innovation and business value for risk and finance professionals at www.sas.com/risk

Hear from Daniel Wagner, CEO of Country Risk Solutions, about the complexities of the global geopolitical risk landscape.

In these volatile and uncertain times, identifying, measuring and managing geopolitical risk is a daunting task. Everywhere we turn, geopolitical struggles are grabbing headlines, whether we’re talking about, for example, the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars, U.S.-China strategic relations, or Red Sea hostilities.

These multi-layered events are having a huge impact across the risk management spectrum, affecting everything from market risk to supply-chain risk to credit risk, cyber risk and liquidity risk. Complicating matters further, they are idiosyncratic and very difficult to predict.

Keeping all this in mind, there are certainly still steps that financial risk managers can take to better measure and mitigate geopolitical threats.

Our guest speaker, Daniel Wagner, is the perfect person to shed light on today’s complex geopolitical environment and to peer into the future.

Links From Today’s Discussion:

GARP Risk Snapshot April 2024: Geopolitical Risk

GARP Benchmarking Initiative (GBI)®

Speaker’s Bio

Daniel Wagner, founder and CEO, Country Risk Solutions

Daniel has more than three decades of experience assessing cross-border risk. He is an authority on political risk insurance and analysis and has worked for some of the world’s most respected and best-known companies, including AIG, GE, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank Group. Until the end of 2023, he was Adaptation Finance Lead and Technical Advisor on Private Capital Mobilization for COP28 in Abu Dhabi. Prior to that, he was Senior Investment Officer for Guarantees and Syndications at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Beijing and Abu Dhabi.

Daniel has published 10 books – Decision-Making in the Polycrisis Era, The Chinese Epiphany, The Chinese Vortex, The America-China Divide, China Vision, AI Supremacy, Virtual Terror, Global Risk Agility and Decision-Making, Managing Country Risk, and Political Risk Insurance Guide – as well as more than 700 articles on current affairs and risk management. He is a regular contributor to such publications as the South China Morning Post, Sunday Guardian, Diplomatic Courier and Fair Observer, among many others. Please see www.countryrisksolutions.com for a full listing of his publications and media interviews.

Hear from Alla Gil, the co-founder and CEO of Straterix, as we examine the liquidity risk challenges and trends that have been fueled by extremely rare market conditions.

In a recent survey conducted by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, 80% of economists named stagflation – or a combination of high inflation and stagnant growth – as the greatest long-term risk to the U.S. economy. The economists said that stagflation presents an even bigger threat than a 2023 recession, and this news has undoubtedly added to the consternation currently felt by liquidity risk managers.

We haven’t seen a true period of stagflation in the U.S. since the oil crisis of the 1970s, and its therefore very difficult to factor this anomalous macroeconomic risk into contemporary liquidity risk models.

Alla Gil joins GARP editorial director Robert Sales to discuss the impact of stagflation and the steps risk practitioners responsible for modeling and managing liquidity risk can take to ensure that they have enough cash on hand, both now and in the future?

SPEAKER’s BIO:

Alla Gil is CEO and co-founder of Straterix Inc. With an academic background in theoretical mathematics, she began her Wall Street career at Goldman Sachs, working on stochastic models for derivative pricing. While heading Global Strategic Advisory teams at Citigroup, Nomura - and again at Goldman Sachs - she introduced stochastic modelling and an optimization approach to the world of corporate finance. Over a 20-year period, Alla advised banks, sovereign treasuries, insurance companies, asset managers, and pension funds on ALM, stress testing, long-term risk projections, liquidity, optimal capital allocation and balance sheet optimization With Straterix, she has developed a methodology and tools that enable clients to automate the process of scenario creation and expansion to assist in strategic capital planning and optimization, as well as risk management and stress testing.

Clearly, the impacts of COVID-19 on banks globally are unprecedented and requiring huge pivots in a short time. Join us on this podcast where our experts discuss banking challenges, the impacts on balance sheet reporting, relationships with regulators, auditors and investors, what it all means for loan portfolios, the intersections with governments and supervisory authorities, and the implications for CECL during this critical year.

For more resources on this issue from SAS - click below:

Over the years, GARP and SAS have worked together to bring risk practitioners unique insights on a variety of topics related to financial risk and have partnered on this episode of our COVID podcast series.

As a leader in analytics, SAS has more than 40 years of experience helping organizations solve their toughest problems. Our unrelenting commitment to innovation enables banks to modernize and sustain a competitive edge. SAS provides an integrated, enterprise-wide risk-management platform for managing risk in an organization, from strategic to reputational, operational, financial or compliance-related risk management. Learn more about how SAS is driving innovation and business value for risk and finance professionals at www.sas.com/risk.

Speaker Bios:

Prof. Dr. Donald Baillie is the head of the Risk Practice for Austria, Germany & Switzerland at SAS. He has 25+ years’ experience in the Financial Markets, and Risk Management in particular, having worked for banks (Treasury and Market Risk), a big-4 consultancy, and most recently as managing director of a medium-sized international management consultancy. He has been involved in more than 100 Finance and Risk Management projects throughout Central and Eastern Europe. Donald holds a professorship at a University of Applied Science in Vienna, and has taught Finance, Risk and Data Science courses for almost 20 years and (co)authored several books. In addition to other professional certifications such as Stock and Derivatives Markets trading licenses, he is a proud holder of GARP’s FRM certification.

Manuel Fortes is the Global Solution Lead for Expected Credit Loss at SAS , with strong Industry, risk and SAS knowledge within a wide spectrum of risk solutions. More than 20 years of experience, ranging from data modelling and ETL processes, including risk modelling and reporting, to solution implementation, in the Risk and Finance area.

Tim McPeak is a Principal Industry Consultant with the Risk Research & Quantitative Solutions division at SAS. He has over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry with a specific focus on credit risk management. Prior to joining SAS, Tim worked as a Senior Risk Management Consultant with financial technology firm Sageworks with previous experience in retail, commercial and investment banking.

COVID-19 is having a dramatic impact on the nature of market, credit, financial, and operational risks facing companies. Information about these risks is evolving at a rapid pace. To help risk managers stay informed of the latest developments and address the challenges associated with COVID-19, GARP has launched a podcast series featuring lively discussions with thought leaders and experts.

This week we will be taking a look at the intersection between the COVID-19 crisis and risks around Climate Change. The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a lot of questions about the impact of the lockdowns on the environment, how quickly new behaviors can be adopted in a crisis and what lessons can be learned from our experience with COVID-19 that may be helpful as risk managers move to mitigate the expected consequences of Climate Change. In this episode, we speak with Naeem Siddiqi, Senior Advisor, Risk and Quantitative Solutions, SAS Institute Inc. and Peter Plochan, FRM, Principal Business Solutions Manager at SAS about what COVID-19 can teach companies about mitigating climate risk.

Over the years, GARP and SAS have worked together to bring risk practitioners unique insights on a variety of topics related to financial risk and have partnered on this episode of our COVID podcast series.

As a leader in analytics, SAS has more than 40 years of experience helping organizations solve their toughest problems. Our unrelenting commitment to innovation enables banks to modernize and sustain a competitive edge. SAS provides an integrated, enterprise-wide risk-management platform for managing risk in an organization, from strategic to reputational, operational, financial or compliance-related risk management. Learn more about how SAS is driving innovation and business value for risk and finance professionals at www.sas.com/risk.

Speaker Bios

Peter Plochan, Principal Business Solutions Manager at SAS is a FRM certified Risk Management specialist with strong analytical mindset and finance background. He is combining 10+ years of Risk Management experience from ABN AMRO Bank, PWC, Atradius, GARP, PRMIA. Since 2014 he is with SAS as global acting domain expert leveraging the latest trends in AI and analytics with the deep risk management & finance expertise.

Naeem Siddiqi is the author of Credit Risk Scorecards (Wiley & Sons, 2005), and Intelligent Credit Scoring (Wiley & Sons, 2017), and has advised and trained bankers in over 20 countries on the art and science of credit scoring. Naeem has worked in retail credit risk management since 1992, both as a consultant and as a risk manager at financial institutions.

At SAS, Naeem played a key role in the development of products relating to credit scoring. He is currently responsible for advising customers on issues pertaining to credit scoring and decisioning, risk strategy, climate change risk, AI/ML in credit risk as well as modernizing analytics infrastructures. He continues to meet and advise C-level bankers in between 40-50 top lending institutions worldwide annually.

Naeem has an Honours Bachelor of Engineering from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of London, and an MBA from York University in Toronto.