Main Conference Day Two - GMT (Greenwich Mean Time, GMTZ)
- Helyette Geman - Research Professor & Member, John Hopkins University & Board of Bloomberg Commodity Index
- Bruno Dupire - Head Of Quantitative Research, Bloomberg L.P.
- Martim Rocha - Senior Director, Global Head of Risk Banking Solutions, SAS
Why mathematical models fail, how bias amplifies through automation, and building systems that know when not to trust the numbers
- Hannah Fry - Professor of the Public Understanding of Mathematics, University of Cambridge
- Laura Ballotta - Professor of Mathematical Finance, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass)
Discover how AI is transforming credit analysis, from unlocking new insights in ratings research to building intelligent agents and streamlining end-to-end credit workflows.
The session will cover:
- What value AI-generated features can unlock from credit and ratings research.
- How to build your own AI agent, fueled with leading data and analytics.
- An end-to-end credit workflow: from identifying risk signals to producing an auditable credit view
- Liam Hynes - Global Head of New Product Development - Public Markets, S&P Global Market Intelligence
- Alan Kwan - Head of Market Development, Credit Solutions EMEA, S&P Global Market Intelligence
- Daniel Sandberg - Global Head of Quantitative Research & Solutions, S&P Global Market Intelligence
Gen-AI wrote the model. Who validates it? A look at where agentic techniques earn their place in risk - and where they don't.
Most institutions have run a Gen-AI experiment in risk. Very few have one in production. This session looks at what separates the two: where generative and agentic techniques genuinely improve model development, validation and hedging, and where they quietly reintroduce the risk they were meant to remove. Using Beacon Intelligence as the working example, we'll show a risk team getting from raw position to a validated, audit-ready answer without pulling the quant desk into every request, and where a human still has to sign off.
- Tony Yum - Lead Engineer, Risk and Performance Engineering, Clearwater Analytics
- Rama Cont - Chair of Mathematical Finance, University of Oxford
- Fabio Mercurio - Global Head of Quant Analytics, Bloomberg L.P.
- Alexander Sokol - Executive Chairman, CompatibL
Many practical applications of term structure modeling require interest rates to be bounded from below. The standard rate-bounding methods cannot be applied in multi-factor models that rely on analytical zero-coupon bond pricing formulas. Volatility decay near the boundary, as observed in market data, provides an empirically consistent mechanism for enforcing rate bounds. The volatility decay needs to be applied across the entire forward curve rather than to a single rate, which is consistent with the theoretical results of Lyashenko, Mercurio, and Sokol (2025). We show how the volatility decay can be applied within the Factor Heath–Jarrow–Morton (FHJM) modeling framework and present numerical results demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in enforcing rate bounds.
- Andrei Lyashenko - Head of Market Risk and Pricing Models, Quantitative Risk Management (QRM), Inc.
- Youssef Elouerkhaoui - Managing Director, Global Head of Markets Quantitative Analysis, Citigroup
We present with DYSANOS a model framework for realistic generation of paths of daily smooth option surfaces for all strikes and expiries which are free of static arbitrage, and for which we therefore can find a change to a risk-neutral measure. DYSANOS is therefore the first production-grade ``market model`` for surfaces of European options. Our model is designed to generate entire path of daily spot and option prices for years in the future. We capture two days to expiry up to any expiry further out.
- Hans Buehler - Visiting Professor, University of Oxford
- Gbenga Ibikunle - Professor and Chair of Finance, University of Edinburgh
- Cindy Yang - Researcher, Edinburgh Centre for Financial Innovations
- Hamza Bahaji - Head of Financial Engineering and Investment Solutions, Amundi ETF, Indexing & Smart Beta,, Amundi
We classify return environments using turbulence measures to capture point‑in‑time relationships among CTA managers. Turbulence measures avoid rolling‑window correlations and allow decomposition into magnitude surprise and correlation surprise. Magnitude surprise reflects unusually large return movements across managers, while correlation surprise measures deviations from prevailing correlation structures. Empirically, magnitude surprise is positively related to contemporaneous and short‑term subsequent CTA returns, consistent with managed futures performing well during market stress. Magnitude surprise is also associated with elevated contemporaneous cross‑sectional dispersion, though this effect is not persistent, consistent with transitory market shocks. In contrast, correlation surprise is followed by weaker CTA performance over subsequent months, suggesting that increased disagreement across managers is detrimental to group‑level returns. Overall, the results demonstrate the value of point‑in‑time correlation measures for identifying distinct market regimes and events such as crises.
- Marat Molyboga - Chief Risk Officer, Director of Research, Efficient Capital Management
Private-firm analytics are often limited by incomplete, stale, or inconsistent financial data. Market capitalization is unavailable by definition; other financial variables such as total debt or leverage may be missing or unreliable. This paper develops a scalable framework for forecasting market capitalization and imputing missing financial quantities for private firms. The framework extends the Comparable Company Analysis by calibrating relationships on a large public-firm universe and applying them to private firms through sector, industry, region, and credit-quality information. The resulting estimates provide a internally consistent set of firm-level financial inputs that can support downstream applications such as credit-risk assessment, stress testing and private-credit portfolio analytics. The framework is designed for large-universe applications where manual valuation is infeasible, and missing values cannot simply be ignored.
- Matthias Arnsdorf - Global Head of Counterparty Credit & Market Risk Modelling, JP Morgan Chase
We present a couple of new methologies for Monte Carlo calibration of local volatility overlay of general stochastic volatility models.
These methods apply to multi-factor, path dependent, rough and tough variations of stochastic volatility models.
We discuss why risk reports in stochastic local volatility models can be noisy and what to do about it. Application to exotic option pricing such as autocalls, barriers, cliquets, var/vol products will also be discussed.
- Jesper Andreasen - Head of Quantitative Analytics, Verition Fund Management
By avoiding the overly restrictive assumptions of risk-neutral pricing, entropic risk optimisation provides a framework for risk-adjusted hedging that enables comprehensive P&L explanation and supports model risk analysis. In this presentation, a linear Gaussian test harness is used to derive exact expressions for the P&L contributions arising from suboptimal hedging, market incompleteness and unanticipated volatility, and the price adjustments that mitigate in-model and out-of-model risks.
- Paul McCloud - Independent Research, McCloud Research
- Elisa Alòs Alcalde - Associate Professor, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF)
- Òscar Burés - PhD Student, University of Barcelona
We apply the framework of mixture models for Quantitative Finance tasks. In particular we base our considerations on computing conditional expectations to consider advanced and efficient regression techniques, the generation of scenarios (GenAI) including fat-tailed distributions apart from the standard Monte Carlo setting and, finally, apply adapted optimal transport techniques to the pricing and calibration of European/Bermudan/American options.
- Jörg Kienitz - Director Quantitative Methods, m|rig GmbH
- Uwe Naumann - Professor Of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University
We study whether directional macro-narrative scores extracted from news can be used to form cross-sectional signals for U.S. equity and factor portfolios.
Using 65 evergreen narratives over 2004-2025, we estimate expanding-window narrative betas and combine them with weekly changes in narrative scores to construct two related strategies: a characteristics-weighted portfolio that ranks assets by exposure to current narrative shifts, and a narrative momentum portfolio that ranks narratives by their recent score trends.
We compare a prompted large language model (LLM) sentiment score with a bag-of-words vector representation (BoW) attention measure and with a non-text benchmark based on principal components from the FRED-MD macro panel.
Across both asset universes considered, the LLM-based signals generate positive returns in both portfolio constructions, while the BoW baseline is generally weaker and the macro benchmark remains competitive.
The evidence is most naturally interpreted as showing that directional narrative measures extracted from text can complement traditional macro signals, rather than as a stand-alone replacement.
- Gabin Taibi - GenAI Researcher, LGT Private Banking
- Saeed Amen - Cofounder, Turnleaf Analytics
- Raphaël Douady - Research Professor, University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
- Mihail Turlakov - Quant Trader, Independent
- Known modelling challenges of historic VaR and Monte Carlo VaR
- Reactivity challenge to joint projections. Persistence of joint tail behaviour in stress market regimes
- Modelling extreme loss scenarios. EVT distributions. Joint tail behaviour and choice of copula
- Can we derive a ‘universal’ copula within VaR/CVaR frameworks?
- Dissection of high dimensional empirical copula into analytical components
- Market regimes and implications for portfolio modelling
- Vladimir Chorniy - Managing Director, Head of Risk Model Fundamentals and Research Lab, Senior Technical Lead, BNP Paribas
- Sergii Arkhypov - Quantitative Analyst, BNP Paribas
- Luitgard Veraart - Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science
- Nadhem Meziou - Quantitative Expert Leader, Global Markets, Natixis
