Savita Verma is a financial risk management professional with expertise in market and credit risk. Her work experience covers risk management in the banking industry, in the financial risk management systems design and delivery industry, as a finance academic, and in marketing research. With more than 24 years of experience, Savita has held roles covering economic capital methodologies, credit and risk analytics, financial engineering, and academic and applied research in a number of countries. RBC Capital Markets, Algorithmics, Misys, Scotiabank and at the Schulich School of Business at York University, Toronto are among the institutions she has worked at. She has authored and co-authored articles and books on finance. Savita has a Ph.D. in Business Administration (Finance) from the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India. She is currently Manager, Quantitative Modeling Team of the Risk Architecture Department and a member of the Analytics & Risk Technology (ART) Project Team - at the UK Financial Services Authority (UK FSA).
Vijay Krishnaswamy is a Partner and Heads the Enterprise Risk Management of Hymans Robertson, a boutique consulting firm in the UK. He has over 14 years of experience. He is a seasoned risk and capital professional with a unique international background spanning banking, consulting and regulation. He is also a regular speaker at industry conferences. His previous roles included working for the Financial Services Authority (FSA) overseeing a number of programmes to implement best practice in the regulator’s own bank-wide stress testing models as well as reviewing ICAAPs and stress tests of UK banks. He also set up and co-chaired the FSA’s internal model governance committee. In his consulting career including with KPMG, he worked with a range of financial institutions across the world on diverse topics in financial risk and capital, including model development and validation, reverse stress testing, capital management, planning and budgeting, and supporting regulatory applications. Prior to that, his industry experience spans a variety of roles in the front office, credit analysis, risk analytics and project management with Standard Chartered Bank and ANZ Banking Group. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and an MBA in Finance from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.
Eric Takigawa is a Managing Director at Markit, a leading supplier of specialty financial information services and products to the global business community. He is part of the Markit Analytics team in Asia, a risk management software solution provider focused on the financial capital markets. Prior to Markit, he was the managing director for another risk management software solution boutique firm covering Asia Pacific and grew the business as the financial institutions in the region developed risk management capabilities since the Asian crisis of 1997-1998. Prior to a career in the financial capital markets industry he developed large scale Monte Carlo simulation models for military applications including surveillance, communications and other defensive systems based on several years of support of military operations in the field applying operations research theory to real-world situations. Prior to that, he provided analysis of inertial guidance systems through estimation of error coefficients with empirical results. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.
Michael Schouten is a Senior Risk Consultant at Hymans Robertson, a UK-based risk management consultancy for pension funds, insurers, banks and asset managers. He has 11 years of experience developing state-of-the-art quantitative models within the financial services sector, most of which focus on complex legal and regulatory issues. He has recently presented at conferences covering a range of issues relating to the new regulatory requirements in stress testing and reverse stress testing Michael also develops valuation models for exotic derivatives and illiquid asset classes that are used in Hymans Robertson proprietary Economic Scenario Generator (ESG). Michael holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Edinburgh, where he published research in the area of genetic mapping for complex disease. He has since used his research methodology to develop more robust models to measure Operational Risk. He also has an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and BA in Economics-Mathematics from Columbia University. Michael has also qualified for the Professional Risk Manager (PRM) designation from PRMIA and is a member of the PRMIA steering committee in Edinburgh.
