Risk Live Europe

Rory Stewart is a diplomat, author, explorer, academic, and politician – serving in successive Conservative governments as minister of state for international development, minister for environment, minister of state for Africa, and minister of state for prisons. He is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, where he teaches politics and international relations.

Stewart is an acclaimed author and co-host of the successful podcast, The Rest is Politics, alongside Alastair Campbell. He has been described by the New York Times as “living one of the most remarkable lives on record.”. Stewart was the first man to walk across Afghanistan after the US-UK invasion, and served as deputy governor of two Iraqi provinces at the age of 29. He advised the US President and British Prime Minister on their Afghanistan and Middle East policy. Stewart is proficient in 11 languages.

Chris Knight took the role of group chief risk officer 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 their 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 chief risk officer 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.

Marina specializes in risk management and innovation with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and digital transformation. She has extensive experience in global capital markets non-financial risks with a focus on conduct risk, rogue trading, fraud, financial crime, trade and comms surveillance. She also has experience in risks and controls relating to Artificial Intelligence, Large Language Models and Data Privacy.

Over the years, Marina has held positions as an executive committee and board member at various institutions and participated in Global Capital Market and Innovation forums.

Marina has extensive experience working with regulators globally. She acted as lead validator, at Top Tier banks, on regulatory conduct risk programmes sanctioned by the US Federal Reserve Bank and the US Department of Justice. Marina also acted as the Head of Global Markets Risk & Control Assessment at BNP Paribas. She was the Citigroup Head of Audit for a number of countries and received the Global recognition award for her performance. Previously, she worked in quantitative research as well as due diligence projects during M&A banking transactions and IPOs.

Marina is a qualified chartered accountant and member of the ICAEW. She completed a Technology Entrepreneurship course at Harvard as well as ‘AI Strategy & Governance’ and ‘ESG Risks & Opportunities’ courses at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania. She also studied FinTech at the University of Oxford Said Business School during which she developed a FinTech innovation idea aiming at fundraising for people impacted by natural disasters. Marina studied Investment Management at the London Business School and has an MSc in Economics & Finance from Warwick Business School.

Marina is very interested in technology. She focuses on digital transformation and driving innovation in risk management by using data analytics, LLMs and AI.  She is a member of the ICAEW Financial Services Faculty Board and ICAEW Digital Assets Steering Group. She is a founding member and vice-chair of the ExCo of the Hellenic Tech Network, participated in studies around the implementation of digital currencies, and reviewed the AI Governance of a leading FinTech academic centre in the UK.

Marina acts as guest lecturer at Executive MBA courses and speaker at conferences globally covering conduct risk, digital transformation, digital assets, Artificial Intelligence, FinTech and ESG. She is also a guest contributor on these topics writing in industry journals.

Daniel Mankowitz is a staff research scientist at Google Deepmind, working on solving the key challenges that will unlock reinforcement learning algorithms to work on real-world applications at scale. This includes a focus on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in the context of large language models (LLMs) such as Gemini. 

He has worked on: code optimization, code generation, chip design, video compression, recommender systems, and controlling physical systems such as heating ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), with publications in Nature and Science. 
 

Marco Giovanni Crotti is a policy expert at the European Banking Authority (EBA). He is responsible for the implementation of the EBA FRTB roadmap and represents the EBA at the BCBS Market Risk Group. 

Crotti holds a MSc in mathematical engineering from Politecnico di Milano and an executive master in EU studies at the centre international de formation européenne.

Kanwardeep Ahluwalia is co-head of global markets risk for Bank of America. He joined Bank of America from Swiss Re where he was the group head of financial risk management, which included the role of chief risk officer for asset management, as well as serving as the reinsurance chief risk officer for Emea. Prior to that, Ahluwalia worked at Bear Stearns where he had a number of positions leading to the roles of chief risk officer 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.

After graduating from University of Pavia in 1997 with a degree in business and economics, Stefano Biondi started to work as a junior risk manager for JP Morgan, first in Milan and then in London. Soon afterward he joined ABN AMRO Bank and subsequently moved to Amsterdam as senior credit risk manager in charge of trading counterparty credit risk management. 

During his 5 years stint at ABN AMRO Bank, Biondi also worked on the implementation of a bank-wide credit risk portfolio modelling system as well as a risk reporting tool. Following that experience at ABN AMRO he came back to London to accept a role as head of credit risk analytics and portfolio reporting at Standard Bank of South Africa in charge, among other things, of implementing the internal model for the Basel 2 FIRB project. In January 2007 Biondi returned to Italy where he joined Banca Mediolanum as head of risk control with group-wide risk management responsibilities. In 2011 he undertook an executive master in business and banking administration at Bocconi University. In 2014 Biondi took, within risk management of Banca Mediolanum, the responsibility for quantitative modelling, reporting and group wide coordination. In April 2018 became head of risk management for Banca Mediolanum reporting to the group chief risk officer. In March 2020, Biondi became group chief risk officer for Banca Mediolanum. 

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.

Eduardo Epperlein has over 20 years experience in the financial industry and is currently managing director and global head of risk methodology at Nomura. He is responsible for credit, market and operational risk methodology, as well as stress testing analytics. Prior to joining Nomura, Epperlein held various roles in risk methodology at Citigroup, including model validation. He holds a PhD in plasma physics from Imperial College, London, and spent 10 years as a research scientist prior to joining the financial industry.

Jason Mitchell is Man Group’s Co-Head of Responsible Investment. He co-chairs Man Group’s Responsible Investment Committee and its Stewardship and Active Ownership Committee. Besides having managed environmental and sustainability strategies, he speaks and publishes widely on responsible investment. He also hosts the podcast Perspectives Towards a Sustainable Future.

Most recently, Jason was Sustainability Strategist at Man Group. He worked at Man GLG from 2004 to 2008 and from 2010 to present, taking two years off from 2008 to 2010 to advise the UK government on infrastructure development across Sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to this, he was an investment analyst with Pequot Capital and Andor Capital.

Jason serves as one of 15 appointed members on the EFRAG (European Financial Reporting Advisory Group) European Lab Steering Group and sits on the Advisory Board of Imperial College Business School’s Centre for Climate Finance and Investment. Having chaired the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) Hedge Funds Advisory Committee from 2014 to 2018, he now serves on the PRI Academic Advisory Committee and a number of other working groups. He is also co-editor of PRI Perspectives academic journal.

Jason holds a master’s degree in international political economy from the London School of Economics and a bachelor’s degree in English literature and classics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and the British-American Project. He was named one of Institutional Investor’s 2011 Hedge Fund Rising Stars.

His articles and comments on sustainable investing have appeared in Institutional Investor, Wall Street Journal, CNBC Squawk Box, Responsible Investor, Aftenposten, Global Times, AIMA Journal and Investment Europe. He has also written widely on the European refugee migrant crisis, with articles appearing in the London Review of Books, Christian Science Monitor, Huffington Post and 7x7.

He is a contributing author to Responsible Investing: A Guide to Environmental, Social, and Governance Investments (Routledge: 2018), Sustainable Investing: Revolutions in theory and practice (Routledge: 2017) and Evolutions in Sustainable Investing: Strategies, Funds and Thought Leadership (Wiley Finance: 2012)

Adrian Cox is a strategist on Deutsche Bank’s Thematic Research team, focused on the implications of Artificial Intelligence for investors, enterprises and society. He joined Deutsche Bank in 2009 and held senior leadership roles in Communications in London and Sydney before joining DB Research. He previously spent a decade covering finance and economics as an award-winning journalist and editor at Bloomberg News and the Financial Times in London, Brussels and New York. He is a graduate of Cambridge University and has an MBA from City University in London.