Carol Alexander

Research Council at Exponential Science and Professor of Finance at University of Sussex

Speaker

Professor Alexander specializes in financial risk analysis, derivatives, and digital asset markets, with a focus on model design, validation, pricing, and risk management across traditional and crypto asset markets. Her work includes the design and implementation of mathematical models for pricing, trading, hedging, and risk assessment, as well as model validation and design, including applications to crypto asset clearing houses, margin models, and digital asset benchmarking. Professor Alexander has served as an expert witness and consulting expert in litigation matters, including class action cases, insider trading and a pension fund dispute, and has been engaged by law firms in the US, UK, and EU. She has also consulted for clients such as Credit Agricole Asset Management, New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange, and FTX US on the design and implementation of cutting-edge models for trading, hedging, and risk management. Professor Alexander is the author of Market Models and the bestselling four-volume textbook Market Risk Analysis. She also devised the syllabus for and edited the three-volume Professional Risk Manager’s Handbook and has published over a hundred papers in academic research journals. Professor Alexander has held advisory and board roles with the Professional Risk Manager’s International Association, the Fields Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the FT Wilshire Digital Assets Group, and the Bachelier and Leverhulme prize committees. Her earlier roles include positions at Nikko Securities, Algorithmics, and UBS Phillips and Drew.

Carol previously held senior industry roles as director and head of market risk modelling at Nikko Securities, director at Algorithmics (the pioneering global risk software firm), and bond analyst at Phillips & Drew. She continues to advise the finance sector and regulatory bodies worldwide. Professor Alexander’s contributions have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Professional Risk Managers International Association’s Higher Standard Award and inclusion among the top 10 female quants on Wall Street. She leads research projects on risk management in decentralized finance, crypto market microstructure, leveraged staking and re-staking, price discovery and volatility spillover in bitcoin derivatives, and the procyclicality of self-clearing on crypto exchanges. Her consultancy work includes the design of the Bitcoin Volatility Index and validation of crypto asset index models for CryptoCompare. She has also acted as model architect for derivatives margining and clearing frameworks in digital asset markets, including the design and supervision of the implementation of a new margin model for a major US-based crypto exchange. In addition, she has advised on the adaptation of established third-party risk and clearing infrastructure for application to digital assets within a horizontally structured crypto clearing environment, extending traditional financial risk methodologies to accommodate the unique features of blockchain-based markets.