Agenda - day 2

Victoria Collins' 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. Collins 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.

Nadia Bouzebra is the head of model risk management in Close Brothers, a UK merchant banking group who provides lending, deposit taking, wealth management services and securities trading. Within her current role, she is responsible for providing oversight and challenge to the models used in the Bank. The team ensures models are compliant with internal policy and governance, and with external regulations. They are also responsible for Close Brothers’ understanding and monitoring of the model risk through independent model validation and governance.

Bouzebra has a quantitative background - master’s degree in econometrics and a postgraduate in economics - with over 15 years of experience in risk management in the financial sector. She has worked in several significant engagements in France and UK, with a particular focus on model development, validation, risk governance, stress testing.

Michael Grimwade is managing director, operational risk, at ICBC Standard Bank and has previously held senior op risk management roles at MUFG Securities, RBS and Lloyds. Prior to this, he held management consultant positions at PwC and Deloitte Consulting. Grimwade has been a director of the Institute of Operational Risk (IOR) and is currently the chair of the Association of Foreign Banks' Operational Risk Expert Panel. He has authored a number of articles on setting appetite for op risk; scenario analysis techniques; climate change; quantifying emerging risks; and modelling op risk capital. He received an award in 2014 from the IOR for his contribution to the profession. His second book, Ten laws of operational risk, was published in December 2021.

Dimitris is a managing director of non-financial risk management at Credit Suisse, where he is focused on the advancement of the non-financial risk principle primarily through the development of analytical methods & tools. He has global responsibility for capital and stress testing, risk appetite and NFR analytics, and is the 2021 winner of Innovation in Risk Management award from Risk.net.

Dimitris is also a member of the board of directors of ORX, the largest industry association with membership extending to 100+ international banks & insurers. He is the chairman of the ORX Board Audit, Risk & Quality Assurance subcommittee and works closely with ORX management on the association’s strategy.

Prior to joining Credit Suisse in 2010, he held multiple roles within group risk analytics at Lloyds Bank. Dimitris is mathematician and holds an MSc in Risk & Financial Mathematics from Brunel University.

Philip Alexander is the regulation desk editor for Risk.net, overseeing a team of journalists in the UK, US and Asia. He was previously senior editor at The Banker magazine, covering financial regulation, capital markets, derivatives and central and eastern Europe.

Prior to entering journalism, Alexander edited sovereign credit research for rating agency Standard & Poor’s in London. He was awarded a PhD in modern history by the University of Cambridge for a thesis on Britain and European integration.

Maria Lombardo heads the global ESG advisory team at Standard Chartered Bank, supporting the bank clients in their sustainability and transition strategies. She spent more than 25 years in investment banking as managing director, heading emerging market equities sales at Lazard, UBS, Sberbank and Unicredit. 

Lombardo moved into sustainability in 2016 when she joined the non-profit CDP as head of their financial investor members. She then headed the ESG client strategies and climate change strategies at Invesco Global Asset Management in Emea, leading the growth of sustainability investment solutions and the set-up of the global asset manager’s climate strategy. Authors of ESG thought leadership whitepapers, mentor, and contributor to industry initiatives in sustainable financing. Lombardo holds a CFA ESG, a diploma at Cambridge University Sustainability Leadership Institute, along with a CEMS Master and a bachelor’s degree in financial intermediaries at Bocconi University. She is a member of the CFA UK Climate and Investing committee, and is a mentor of the acceleration programme at the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership.

Vasiliki Basiou has more than seven years experience in operational risk capital modelling at Credit Suisse. Currently, she is working on climate risk assessments for operational risk through analytics at UBS. Basiou is skilled in quantitative analysis and risk management, with a master's degree in financial risk management from University College London (UCL). She acquired a certificate in ESG investing from CFA in 2021 due to a high interest in climate risk management and the overall ESG realm.

Prior to joining Risk, he reported on the futures and foreign exchange industries for Dow Jones' Financial News and the Euromoney group of publications. Osborn holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Warwick.

Björn Johansson is the head of group security at Swedbank. He is a former intelligence officer with the Swedish Military Intelligence Service. In his role as security chief at Swedbank, he has leaned on his experience from the intelligence service to establish an innovative corporate security unit that stands ready to meet an increasingly complex threat landscape.

Andrew Dillin is a seasoned security intelligence lead in the field of cyber security, with over a decade of experience in safeguarding digital environments from evolving threats. With a background in computer science and a passion for staying ahead of emerging cyber risks, he has dedicated his career to protecting organisations against cyber-attacks and security threats.

Throughout his career, Dillin has spearheaded numerous initiatives to enhance security postures, leveraging his expertise in threat intelligence, incident response, and vulnerability management. His insights have been instrumental in fortifying the defenses of a number of finance sector companies.

With near 40 years' experience, including UK government, senior legal private practice, corporate board level and academic roles, Mark Lewis is one of the UK's leading specialist technology lawyers. He advises customers and providers in the acquisition and deployment of mission-critical technology products, systems, and IT-enabled services in several sectors, with a focus on regulated financial services and essential national infrastructure.

After 27 years as a partner in leading City of London and international law firms, including as a practice head, and as co-founder and chair of law firms associated with PwC and EY, Mark has re-joined Stephenson Harwood LLP (after a 26-year break) as a senior consultant in the technology practice, based in their London office.  

Since 2019, Lewis has been a visiting professor in practice in the law school of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he has lectured on AI and machine learning, cybersecurity and resilience, cloud computing and related computing business models and relationships. He has also been a guest lecturer on technology, outsourcing and offshoring at Warwick Business School and the Warwick Manufacturing Group.

Lewis has served as chair of Morgan Chambers plc, one of Europe's leading sourcing and outsourcing advisory firms (since acquired by KPMG), as an independent non-executive director of Delt Shared Services Limited (a public sector-owned provider of IT, cyber and business process shared services to regional government, the NHS and other public services bodies), as well as a non-executive director of CoSector (a provider of, among others, computing services to the University of London and other major UK universities).

He has contributed chapters to various books and leading texts on information technology and outsourcing, as well as co-authoring white papers on ethical investment in AI and the ethical and legal deployment of AI in human capital management. Lewis has had articles published in, among others, the Journal of Securities Operations & Custody, Practical Law (PLC), Practical Law Magazine, and was general editor and UK chapter author in Getting The Deal Through – Outsourcing (2014-16) and Getting The Deal Through – Cloud Computing (2018-20) ".

He was called to Bar (England and Wales) by Lincoln's Inn in 1982. He has practised as a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales since requalifying in 1991

Biljana Vujović is cheif risk officer for Addiko Bank, supervising the bank's management team, ensuring effective decision making and adherence to ethical standards. Her role includes continuously evaluating the bank's risk appetite and ensuring that risk management strategies are implemented effectively, ensuring that bank consistently meets regulatory standards, monitoring for potential violations, and overseeing the establishment and effectiveness of internal controls, as well as supervising the internal and external audit to ensure they are robust and independent. 

Vujović also chars the risk committee of the supervisory board

Adrian Docherty leads the Bank Advisory team, which provides key relationship bank clients with technical sector expertise and help on strategic financial issues relating to balance sheet management and efficiency.

In practice, this means advising on capital raising alternatives, risk management and transfer frameworks, regulatory developments (especially Basel III and IV), accounting changes (especially IFRS 9), funding/liquidity strategies, credit portfolio management, solvency creation/optimisation structures and innovative ways of financing growth. In recent years, the issue of “disruption and obsolescence” (ie. new banking business models) has increasingly featured; so now too do strategies around Brexit

Adrian has 25 years’ experience in advising financial institutions, initially as a strategy consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton. After nine years at Booz Allen, Adrian was hired by one of his clients, Barclays, to help run the rapidly growing investment banking business line. Adrian spent three years as COO of Investment Banking, before moving to run the balance sheet advisory team in Barclays Capital’s Financial Institutions Group.

Adrian has a Master’s from Cambridge University. His book "Better Banking: Understanding and Addressing the Failures in Risk Management, Governance and Regulation" was published by Wiley in 2014

David Semmens is Cadro's chief investment officer, overseeing the investment department and chairing all investment related committees. He is a non-executive director of RiskSave Technologies, a leading provider of technological and regulatory support to asset managers and leading fintechs. Semmens continues to sit on Wealthify's investment committee as an external advisor where he helped develop and oversee the firm’s ethical investment proposition. He also volunteers on the investment committee for one of Scotland's largest education charities and is an adjunct-lecturer delivering a postgraduate finance and investment course at Heriot Watt University. 

Since completing an MSc in economics at the University of Warwick, Semmens has worked in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, New York, and Paris, running the gauntlet in fintech, banking, insurance, and asset management for Wealthify (part of the Aviva Group), HSBC Asset Management, Euler Hermes, and Standard Chartered Bank. He is also a CFA Charterholder with an executive MBA from the University of Cambridge. In his spare time, Semmens enjoys playing cards, crime novels, and walking with his wife in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

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 was most recently 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, Sarraf 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.

His 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.

Sarraf 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.