Risk Management

Robert Kosowski

Programme Director

Robert Kosowski is Professor of Finance at Imperial College Business School. He is also a research fellow at the CEPR and an associate member of the Oxford Man Institute. Robert's research has been published in top peer-reviewed finance journals and has been featured in The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Robert is Head of Quantitative Research (part-time) at Unigestion. Robert holds a BA (First Class Honours) and MA in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge University, and a MSc in Economics and PhD from the LSE.

Damiano Brigo

Imperial College Business School

Damiano is head of group and chair in Mathematical Finance and Stochastic Analysis at Imperial College Business School. Damiano previously served as Gilbart Professor and Head of Group at King's College London, Managing Director and Quantitative Innovation Global Head in Fitch Ratings, Head of Credit Models in Banca IMI and Fixed Income Professor at Bocconi. Damiano is on the board of a few financial institutions and has extensive first-hand experience in the financial industry on a variety of risk management and quantitative modelling roles.

Damiano has published more than 100 works in journals for Mathematical Finance, Systems Theory, Probability and Statistics and books for Springer and Wiley that became field references in stochastic interest rate and credit modelling (8000+ citations, H-index 41). Damiano has been the most cited author in the industry-leading Risk Magazine from 1998-2017. He is on the editorial board of a number of scientific journals. Damiano holds a PhD in stochastic filtering with differential geometry.

Enrico Biffis

Imperial College Business School

Enrico is Associate Professor of Actuarial Finance at Imperial College Business School and Associate Director for Development Finance at the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis. His areas of expertise are risk analysis and asset-liability management, with a focus on applications in the insurance and investment management sectors, as well as the design of predictive analytics and risk management tools for a variety of asset classes. Enrico has collaborated extensively with leading financial institutions, regulators, governmental and non-governmental organisations, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and has been the recipient of grants and awards for his research on the modelling and hedging of large risks.

Prior academic experience includes work as tenured faculty at the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University, as visiting faculty at Nanyang Business School's IRFRC and Bocconi Milan, and as an editor of ASTIN Bulletin – The Journal of the International Actuarial Association. Enrico is a fellow of the Pensions Institute in London and the Munich Risk and Insurance Centre. He was recently awarded the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries' Brian Hey Prize and the Casualty and Actuarial Society's Charles A. Hachemeister Prize for his work on reinsurance data standards as part of the joint IFoA-CAS International Pricing Research Working Party. Details on his current projects and writings can be found in the Research and Publications sections, SSRN and Google Scholar.

John Ludlow

Imperial College Business School

John Ludlow has been Chief Executive Officer of Airmic since June 2017. John has been a director of Airmic since 2012 and a director of the IRM. Previously, John was SVP and Head of Global Risk Management at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG). This was preceded by 15 years of senior operational leadership in hotels, restaurants and pubs. John is a Certified Fellow of the Institute of Risk Management, Visiting Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, Governor at Downside School and Trustee of the Anti-Modern Slavery Alliance.

Paolo Zaffaroni

Imperial College Business School

Paolo is Professor in Financial Econometrics at Imperial College Business School. He has a summa cum laude degree in economic statistics from Roma and holds a PhD in Econometrics from the London School of Economics. He is also teaching at the University of Rome La Sapienza and has previously taught at the London School of Economics and at the University of Cambridge.

Paolo's main research interests are empirical asset pricing, portfolio choice, financial econometrics and econometric theory. His publications include The Annals of Statistics, The Journal of Econometrics, The Journal of Time Series Analysis, The Journal of Empirical Finance, The Journal of Monetary Economics, The Review of Financial Studies and Econometric Theory. His work includes asset pricing and portfolio choice with misspecified models, cross-sectional methods for empirical asset pricing, estimation of generalized dynamic factor models, estimation and testing of risk premia, term structure, multivariate volatility models, aggregation and risk management.

Paolo acts as quantitative consultant in asset and risk management and as instructor of executive courses for various financial institutions.

Didier Michoud

Executive Director, Chief Risk Officer and a Chairman, Unigestion Risk Committee

Didier joined Unigestion in August 2013. He began his career in 2000 in the Investment Management department of Lloyds TSB Bank in Switzerland. Throughout his career, he’s also served as Risk Manager and deputy to the Chief Risk Officer for Banque Cantonale de Genève, a Senior Manager of Economic Capital for Banque Laurentienne du Canada in Montreal, a Senior Manager in the risk advisory practice for PricewaterhouseCoopers, and a Senior Quantitative Analyst for EIM S.A., where he later became Head of Risk Management Europe & Asia, and then Head of Risk Management.

He is a member of the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) and The Professional Risk Managers’ International Association (PRMIA). He holds a MSc and a PhD in Physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne, (EPFL) and is lecturer at HEC-University of Lausanne.

Garry Honey

Author, Trainer and Founder, Chiron Risk

Garry approaches risk from a psychological perspective using latest thinking from behavioural economics and the ‘politics of fear’. Although often treated as compliance obligation, risk reporting offers an opportunity to explore fears of future unknowns, a major cause of risk aversion in boards. Garry has a background in strategic communications. He helps corporate boards articulate intangible value to stakeholders: reputational risk and sustainability risk are especially significant given current interest in ESG ratings for comparative investment funds.

José Ribeiro

Independent Non-executive Director, Starr Companies and the Hansard Group

José has over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry globally. He started his career with American International Group (AIG) in 1986 as a Life and Pensions actuary and spent his first 16 years in the Life and non- Life (re) insurance industries working with AIG and Munich Re, performing senior roles (including CEO) in Europe, the US and Latin America. He moved to London in 2002 to become CEO for Latin America and the Caribbean at Willis Towers Watson (WTW), and in 2007 accepted an invitation to become Director for International Markets at Lloyds of London. His remit covered the whole world excluding the US.

In 2015, José was appointed Managing Director and Board Member for Asia-Pacific at A.M. Best (Credit Rating Agency) and he moved to Hong Kong in 2016 where he remained until 2019. In 2019, José moved back to London and is currently an independent non-executive director for the Starr Companies and the Hansard Group. At Starr, José chairs the Risk Committee and at Hansard he chairs the Remuneration Committee and is also a member of the Audit and Risk Committee. He has a MSc degree in Applied Mathematics, is an EU certified actuary with an MBA degree at Catolica/New York University (NYU) and completed a leadership program at the London Business School (LBS).