GARP Risk Podcast

Insurance plays such an important role in how we collectively navigate risk and many insurance firms are already used to dealing with the extreme weather events that are being made worse and more frequent by climate change. It is therefore important that the experience and insights found within the insurance sector are brought to bear on the pressing task of managing climate risk.

In this episode, host and Co-president of the GARP Risk Institute, Jo Paisley, is joined by John Scott, Head of Sustainability Risk for the Zurich Insurance Group. Through this conversation you will find specific insights into the nature of physical risk, as well as the ways in which insurance firms are positioned to guide effective action and investment towards both mitigation and adaptation efforts.

If you have any questions, thoughts or feedback regarding the Climate Risk podcast series, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at: [email protected]

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Speaker Bio:

John Scott is Head of Sustainability Risk for the Zurich Insurance Group. He joined Zurich in 2001 becoming Head of Risk Insight in 2007 and was Chief Risk Officer for Zurich’s Global Corporate and Commercial Insurance businesses from 2009 to 2017. He took on his current role in 2018. John leads the Group’s engagement on sustainability risk, both internally and externally as the way Zurich delivers its purpose and values.

For the last ten years, in his roles as CRO for Commercial Insurance and as Head of Sustainability Risk, John has increasingly focused on climate change as a risk that affects the insurance industry. His unique combination of previous roles and experiences in the oil & gas and chemicals industries, together with his involvement in many industry and Government organisations, has given him a deep understanding of the risks and opportunities that climate change presents to companies, governments and society at large.

John is a member of the Institute of Directors in the UK, is on the Advisory Board to the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report and has contributed to industry and Government policy on climate change and green finance, through many organisations. John’s expertise in sustainability risk and, in particular climate change risk, has made him a sought-after speaker at numerous international conferences.

We would like to thank our listeners for tuning in to our special subseries on COVID-19. We will be skipping this week due to the holidays, but will resume our weekly series on June 1^st with an enlightening conversation with Arthur Yuen, Deputy CEO of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, on The Economic and Risk Impact of COVID-19: How Hong Kong is Fighting the Pandemic. We hope everyone has a good and safe holiday, and we look forward to seeing you next week.

The current pandemic is having an enormous impact on the leveraged loan markets which until recently were priced to perfection. Bid-Ask spreads have widened dramatically, and leveraged loan indexes have fallen substantially. One of the biggest areas of concern is over collateralization of CLOs, particularly in the US. We would like to invite you to share your insights into these challenges facing the leveraged loan market and risks facing banks, asset managers and investors.

GARP is happy to partner once again with SAS on this episode, which features, David Phillips, CFA, ASA, EA, a Director, Liability Driven Investment Strategies at Parametric, John McMurray, CPA, CFA, the Chief Risk Officer & Chief Audit Executive at Russell Investments, and Stas Melnikov, CFA, FRM – Head of Risk Product Portfolio and Strategy at SAS.

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.

About SAS

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.

For more resources from SAS - click here. 

Bios of our Guests

John McMurray is chief risk officer and chief audit executive at Russell Investments. He has over 35 years of experience in financial services on both the buy and sell sides in asset managers and banks.

David Phillips has spent almost 30 years in the pension industry advising plan sponsors on strategic allocation and risk, particularly LDI, and overseeing global pension investments for a Fortune 500 plan sponsor.

Stas Melnikov, CFA, FRM, is head of risk product portfolio and strategy at SAS. Prior to SAS, Stas was head of market and liquidity risk at Russell Investments and head of residential credit loss forecasting at JPMorgan Chase. 

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.

The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic – including crashing stock markets, plummeting oil prices and soaring unemployment – has resulted in significant credit issues at financial institutions across the globe. All of the uncertainty has not only raised questions about bank capitalization and stability but also forced firms to adjust their credit risk models and assumptions. In this GARP podcast episode, Cris deRitis, Deputy Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics, will discuss how the pandemic is effecting credit risk modeling, Current Expected Credit Loss regulation and stress testing in the US and Europe.

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.

In a suddenly volatile economy, spurred by the coronavirus pandemic, and despite government interventions, bankruptcies and increased defaults will more than likely increase. With new and immature data, produced by this unexpected economic downturn, automated modeling processes will help enhance efficiencies, but data issues will require human judgment for model development. Join Naeem Siddiqi, Senior Advisor in the Risk Research and Quantitative Solutions, SAS and Jerome Caron, Specialist of Analytics Solutions, SAS to take a look at strategic approaches to a calculating Credit Risk in the context of COVID-19.

For a related resource on this subject - click here. 

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.

About SAS

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.

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.

Our first interview is with Ed Amoroso, currently Chief Executive Officer of TAG Cyber LLC, a global cyber security advisory, training, consulting, and media services company supporting hundreds of companies across the world. Ed recently retired from AT&T after thirty-one years of service in the cybersecurity space.

In recent years, financial institutions have proven to be vulnerable to cyberattacks, leaving risk teams scrambling.  With more work pushed online than ever before due to COVID-19 – and hackers finding new ways to exploit networks - understanding new and evolving cyber risks is even more critical today. How can cyber risk and risk management in general keep up with the sophistication and scale of potential attacks against company systems in a work environment that has already been disrupted? What role do CROs and risk managers play in this battle and what role do cybersecurity professionals play in risk management in the future.

To access our full library of COVID-19 content click here.

Dr. Ed Amoroso is currently Chief Executive Officer of TAG Cyber LLC, a global cyber security advisory, training, consulting, and media services company supporting hundreds of companies across the world. Ed recently retired from AT&T after thirty-one years of service, beginning in Unix security R&D at Bell Labs and culminating as Senior Vice President and Chief Security Officer of AT&T from 2004 to 2016.

Ed has been Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the Stevens Institute of Technology for the past twenty-seven years, where he has introduced nearly two thousand graduate students to the topic of information security. He is also affiliated with the Tandon School of Engineering at NYU as a Research Professor, and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University as a senior advisor. He is author of six books on cyber security and dozens of major research and technical papers and articles in peer-reviewed and major publications.

Ed holds the BS degree in physics from Dickinson College, the MS/PhD degrees in Computer Science from the Stevens Institute of Technology, and is a graduate of the Columbia Business School. He holds ten patents in the area of cyber security and media technology and he has served as a Member of the Board of Directors for M&T Bank, as well as on the NSA Advisory Board (NSAAB). Ed’s work has been highlighted on CNN, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He has worked directly with four Presidential administrations on issues related to national security, critical infrastructure protection, and cyber policy.

Welcome back to GARP’s Climate Risk Podcast Series. Through the course of this series we will be bringing you insights from those working at the cutting edge of climate change. We will be joined by regulators, business leaders and risk practitioners who will help us build up a holistic view of the risks and opportunities that climate change poses and explore how this might affect you in your day to day work.

In this episode, host and Co-president of the GARP Risk Institute, Jo Paisley, is joined by Betsy Nelson, recently retired CRO at the EBRD. Here at GARP, we have been emphasising the importance of placing the risks associated with climate change in the broader context of sustainability, which is why we think the perspective of a development bank is such an important one.

Through this episode, you will gain insights into:

• The pros and cons of implementing TCFD
• The appropriate role of stress testing and scenario analysis
• The difficult question of engagement vs. divestment.

Speaker Bio:

Former Vice President Risk and Chief Risk Officer of EBRD (European Bank of Reconstruction and Development)

Betsy Nelson became the EBRD's Vice President Risk and Compliance and Chief Risk Officer in November 2016 and served in that role until December 2019. She had been previously Vice President of Risk. She was a member of the Bank's Executive Committee.

Ms Nelson joined the EBRD in March 2012 as Vice President of the then combined Risk and Resources (Human Resources, Administrative Services and IT) and has extensive experience in the financial sector.

For the three years prior to joining the EBRD, she was the Head of Credit Department in the Risk Specialists Division of the Financial Services Authority (FSA, now PRA) in the United Kingdom, where she built the Authority’s first Credit Department with a team of wholesale, retail, structured finance and Basel credit model experts.

Before this she had a career spanning 30 years at JPMorgan Chase. She has worked most of her career in Europe and the UK. In her last 10 years at JPMorgan Chase, she held a number of senior management positions, including Head of Corporate Banking and Head of Client Credit Management, both for the EMEA region.

Welcome to the first episode of GARP Podcasts Climate Risk Series. Through the course of this series we will be bringing you insights from those working at the cutting edge of climate change. We will be joined by regulators, business leaders and risk practitioners who will help us build up a holistic view of the risks and opportunities that climate change poses and explore how this might affect you in your day to day work.

In today’s show, host and Co-president of the GARP Risk Institute, Jo Paisley, is joined by Michael Sheren, Senior Adviser at the Bank of England, to discuss three foundational questions:

•  Where have we come from?
• Where are we now?
• Where do we need to go?

A new report from the Financial Reporting Lab of the UK Financial Reporting Council (FRC) reveals that companies are falling short of investors’ expectations for clearer reporting on climate-related issues. It notes that while reporting on climate change is an evolving practice, investor expectations are changing rapidly.

The Financial Reporting Lab of the UK Financial Reporting Council (FRC) recently released a report that reveals companies may be falling short of investors’ expectations for clear reporting on climate-related issues. In this episode, GARP Risk Institute Co-President Jo Paisley speaks with Phil Fitz-Gerald, Director of the FRC's Financial Reporting Lab about the key findings of their report, what best practices are emerging around climate related corporate reporting, and how reporting can change behavior. You can download the report here: Climate-related corporate reporting – Where to next?