Risk Live Europe 2024

Mark Manning leads the FCA’s policy work on sustainable finance and investor stewardship. In this role, he is responsible for several initiatives, including the FCA’s implementation of the TCFD’s recommendations and the FCA’s work with IOSCO on corporate reporting standards on sustainability. Prior to joining the FCA in 2018, Mark spent fifteen years as a central banker with the Bank of England (BoE) and the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). He held a number of senior roles, with a particular focus on policy, research and supervision in the field of financial market infrastructures (FMIs). Before joining the official sector, Mark spent several years as a fixed income and currency fund manager with Kleinwort Benson Investment Management and Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Mark holds Master’s degrees in Economics and Finance, from University College London and London Business School, respectively.

Jamie joined the FSA/FCA in October 2007 following 10 years as an industry lobbyist. At the FCA, he has held a number of roles across consumer affairs, supervision, risk and markets, holding senior leadership roles in retail banking supervision, risk & compliance oversight and market oversight. He was deputy accountable executive for MiFID II implementation in the UK and accountable executive for the project onshoring the MiFID regime in the UK in preparation for Brexit. He is currently head of secondary market oversight, responsible for discharging the FCA’s duties under MiFID and MAR in secondary markets.

Sophie is the chief risk and compliance officer of Gulf International Bank (UK) Limited. She is responsible for driving an effective risk culture throughout the company, designing the risk and compliance frameworks and overseeing risk management and regulatory compliance practices. Sophie joined GIB (UK) with extensive experience in the field, having previously served as executive director for compliance and operational risk control at UBS Asset Management. Before this, she was the global head of operational organisational risk at Barings and non-executive director of the Baring-Coller Secondaries Fund. Sophie was also an operational risk manager and the group head of investment risk framework at Schroders.

Sophie graduated from Université Lumière Lyon 2 with a master’s degree in economics and finance. She is a member of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment, a fellow of the Climate Safe Lending Network and a trustee of First Light South West, a charity supporting people affected by sexual violence and domestic abuse.

Jeremy Arnold joined NatWest Markets as chief risk officer in September 2018 and is responsible for leading the organisation's risk function by defining and delivering risk, conduct, compliance and financial crime strategies to support its ambition, strategy and risk appetite. He has extensive experience, spanning a variety of roles in trading and risk management over the past 30 years at a number of leading global financial institutions.

Kanwardeep Ahluwalia is Co-head of Global Markets Risk for Bank of America.

Kanwardeep joined Bank of America from Swiss Re where he was the Group Head of Financial Risk Management, which included the role of CRO for Asset Management, as well as serving as the Reinsurance CRO for EMEA.  Prior to that, he worked at Bear Stearns where he had a number of positions leading to the roles of CRO for Europe & Asia and Global Head of Market Risk.  This was preceded by a period working in regulation for the UK’s former Securities & Futures Authority.

Wei Bennett is the Deputy General Manager and Chief Risk Officer at the China Construction Bank London Branch (CCBLB). She is responsible for the CCBLB's enterprise risk management covering a spectrum of credit risk, market risk and operational risk. Wei also led the CCBLB's Culture & Change Programme in delivering robust culture, conduct and governance at the bank.

Prior to CCBLB, Wei worked at Bank of England for 10 years across risk management & regulatory supervision areas. Wei is a keen promoter for the Sino-UK engagement and cooperation in financial markets and financial regulation, and contributed to the PBOC-BoE joint Symposium during the 10th UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue ("EFD") in 2019, one to name.
 
Wei has a PhD in Economics and is a qualified Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). Wei has a number of publications in leading journals on implications of uncertainty to economic and financial activities. Wei's current interests include Green Finance and Data Analytical in risk management.  

Himanshu Patel leads the risk management group in Europe, providing risk oversight of the investment management group through the design and governance of investment and operational risk management strategies. Prior to joining Vanguard, he spent five years at EY as a senior manager in regulation and risk, providing asset management firms with practical advice on improving conduct and control. Patel has extensive experience in investment risk and performance analysis spanning 15 years at Northern Trust, BlackRock, Credit Suisse and JP Morgan.

Chris Knight took the role of group chief risk officer (CRO) in May 2021. For the previous three years he had been the chief executive of Legal and General’s retail retirement business, where he led the expansion of annuity propositions, developed one of the leading providers of lifetime mortgages and launched our financial advice and care businesses. Knight also serves as Legal and General’s customer champion, representing retail customers’ interests across the whole product range, a perspective he brings to his CRO role. He has previously held positions at Legal and General of finance director of the international division, and chief financial officer of Legal & General Assurance Society. Knight has a first-class economics degree from King’s College, Cambridge and has worked on four continents in a career spanning more than three decades. He is a Fellow of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries.

Sebastjan Smodis is managing director and global head, equity, exchange-traded funds and liquidity risk management at State Street Global Advisors (SSGA). He is responsible for ensuring a robust liquidity risk management framework and governance across the organisation. Smodis also chairs the SSGA Liquidity Committee and is a member of the State Street Country Risk Committee. Prior to this he was a senior investment risk manager responsible for risk oversight across Europe, the Middle East and Africa fixed income, liability driven investment and multi-asset class portfolios. Seb holds a post-experience masters degree in finance from London Business School and a Global Association of Risk Professionals Financial Risk Manager certificate, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst Institute charterholder.

Hanna Sarraf is a senior risk management executive, with over twenty five years’ experience in developing and implementing risk and regulatory management frameworks that deliver effective results in the financial services industry. He is currently the Chief Risk Strategy Officer at Starling Bank and was previously the Group Chief Risk Officer at Bankmed, a regional corporate, retail and private banking organisation with operations across the EMEA region. Prior to joining Bankmed, Hanna was the Group Executive, Head of Risk Strategy at Bank of Ireland and previously held senior risk and regulatory management consulting roles at Ernst & Young, KPMG and Accenture in the UK and globally.

Hanna’s international industry and client consulting experience spans a wide range of risk and regulatory management roles both at the strategic and execution levels gained with leading financial services organisations across all major industry segments in a wide number of geographic markets.

He holds a Specialised Master’s degree in Financial Engineering from the École Supérieure des Sciences Économiques et Commerciales (ESSEC) and an MSc in Finance from Dauphine University in France. He has authored many articles on financial risk management and is a frequent speaker at leading UK and international conferences.

Stefana Brown is chief risk officer, UK protection and fintech, and director, IT and data protection risk, at Legal & General Retail. She spent 10 years at Lloyds Banking Group and four at M&G Investments before joining Legal & General Retail.

Nico is a Research and Product Manager at J.P. Morgan’s AI Research team. He is responsible for bridging the gap between the research team and the business. He is responsible for developing and launching AI products across the organisation and his areas of focus include AI fairness, explainable AI, optimisation and AI planning. Previously, he worked in J.P. Morgan’s Wealth Management Investments Solutions division, where he was responsible for structuring discretionary investment strategies.

Dimitrios is a Head of Risk and Finance Solutions in Moody’s Analytics, leading the Asia Specialist team that focuses on Risk Analytics, Stress Testing and IFRS 9 solutions.

During his time in Moody’s and prior to his move to Asia, Dimitrios led the efforts on designing and successfully implementing IFRS 9 modelling and software solutions for more than 50 banks in Europe and Middle East.

Prior to joining Moody’s in January 2016, Dimitrios worked as Senior Technical Specialist at the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) in London. During that time, he led the internal stress testing model development across the majority of risk types, with a particular focus on wholesale credit risk globally, retail credit risk in the UK and econometric models for key ALM risk metrics. Before joining the PRA, he was part of UBS Group-wide Stress Testing Team where he developed stress testing models for the held to maturity assets of the investment banking arm. Prior to his time at UBS he held various modelling positions at the former Financial Services Authority (FSA), Lloyd’s Banking Group and HBOS.

Dimitrios holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh Business School and an MSc in Applied Economics and Finance from the Athens University of Economics and Business. He is a certified Professional Risk Manager (PRM) since 2006 and tutored at University of Edinburgh where he has conducted extensive research on credit risk modelling and the interaction between credit risk and the real economy.

McBurney is Professor of Computer Science and former Head of the Department of Informatics in the Faculty of Natural and Mathematical Sciences of King's College London. He is a member of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) Research Group of the Department.

McBurney's primary areas of research are in AI and Computational Finance:

• Distributed ledgers, blockchain, smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and ICOs
• AI applied to knowledge-intensive, regulated domains (law, finance, insurance, etc), and
• Agent communications protocols and agent-based simulation.

His work finds application in computational finance and economics, cyber conflict, and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. According to Google Scholar, McBurney has an h-index score of 49, and his most-cited publication has 673 citations.

Since 2007, McBurney has been Joint Editor-in-Chief of the refereed AI journal, The Knowledge Engineering Review, published by Cambridge University Press. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), a board established in 2018 to provide advice on AI, data analytics and regulatory technology (regtech). During 2018-2020, he was an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Law Futures Centre at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

McBurney is a regular speaker and advisor on Artificial Intelligence, on blockchains & distributed ledgers, and on cryptocurrencies. He has experience working on several blockchain Proofs-of-Concept, including for major financial institutions and commodities trading companies.

His research projects include the EPSRC-funded VOLT Project, which aimed to develop trusted voting systems using distributed ledger technologies for management of shareholder rights and for elections in non-government organizations

Andreea Petreanu is currently Head of Credit Risk Management at Mizuho International in London. Over the past 20 years, she has had various risk management roles with global investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, HSBC, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and VTB Capital. Andreea is also an Independent Non-Executive Director and Chair of the Risk Committee of Globalworth, a leading real estate investment company in Central and Eastern listed on AIMS with portfolio value over EUR3bn.  Andreea’s educational background includes an Executive MBA from the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School and an MSc in Insurance and Risk Management from City University, CASS Business School. She is also an Associate of the Chartered Insurance Institute in London.

Richard Bravery, Managing Director, is a member of the BlackRocks Risk and Quantitative Analysis team. Since 2017 he has been the head of the EMEA Equity Risk team based in London where he is responsible for the investment risk management of the active equity strategies within the region. Prior to this he held roles within BlackRocks Behavioural Finance team and he also spent more than 10 years within BlackRock Solutions as the EMEA Head of the Financial Modelling Group, building risk models and analytics solutions, having started his career as a software engineer at Mercury Asset Management.

  
Mr. Bravery holds an undergraduate degree in Medical Physics and a postgraduate degree in Information Technology from University College London.

Victoria’s career spans over 25 years working in financial institutions, in trading, finance and risk roles, predominately in Risk Management. She has been with Nomura for ten years, focused on enterprise-wide risk management. She was appointed Global Head of Climate Risk & ESG three years ago. She is responsible for establishing and managing the global risk management framework for Climate Risk and ESG, and for ensuring risk management is aligned to the firm’s Sustainability objectives, such as Net Zero.