Dispatches from a major risk conference

Your correspondent spent part of this past week attending Risk Live Europe, a financial risk management conference held in London. I’m currently supposed to be penning a book on climate for Risk.net, the organizer of the conference. My editors – quite justifiably – wanted to crack the whip in person.

Attending these events, dominated by financial risk professionals, allows you to take the temperature of the industry. The topics discussed on the conference panels, coupled with the few button-hole conversations I had on the sidelines, helped solidify for me many of the ideas I expressed in a recent GARP article: “The Rise of Conjectural Risk Management”.

I remember attending many of these events back in the dark ages between the global financial crisis and the COVID pandemic. Risk conferences in those days were nerdy affairs where credit risk modelers would present new scoring methodologies, introduce data sets to transform the assessment of potential borrowers, or describe some innovative modeling techniques to help banks grapple with new regulatory requirements.

I remember thinking myself an imposter at such gatherings because I couldn’t understand very much of the math being presented.