In this post we are after a flexible financial services taxonomy that can help us understand both existing and evolving financial system developments. To this end we examine a range of existing classification systems and synthesize the salient requirements.
Who Needs a New Financial Services Taxonomy? Our age is increasingly dominated by the dual challenges and opportunities of the sustainability transition on the one hand, and digital transformation on the other. We witness emerging new financial domains with novel names such as Fintech , or TechFin, or various combinations and hues of Green and Sustainable in Sustainable Finance and we see forces that are reshaping the direction of travel for the financial industry.
June 21 2023 marks the sixth annual #ShowYourStripes Day - a time when meteorologists and other climate communicators around the world raise awareness of our warming planet by displaying colorful visuals of climate change. The warming stripe graphics are representations of the change in temperature over the past 100+ years (here we use the global average). Each stripe represents the temperature averaged over a year. The stripes typically start around the year 1900 and finish in 2022.
We look into ten years of FOSDEM conference data to start getting to grips with the open source phenomenon and also explore techniques for data review and exploratory data analysis using (of course) open source python tools. In the process we identify the imprint of the pandemic on attendance, the longest ever title, the distribution of mindshare of time and some notable newcomers.
FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized, two-day conference celebrating free and open-source software development. The conference has a geographic focus on European open source ecosystems and projects. FOSDEM is primarily aimed at developers, across the entire range of software and aims to enable them to meet and discuss the status of projects.
We look into ten years of FOSDEM conference data to start getting to grips with the open source phenomenon and also explore techniques for data review and exploratory data analysis using (of course) open source python tools.
The Sustainable Finance forum is dedicated to news, events, ideas, research, funding, data and tools relevant to sustainable finance and has just crossed the five thousand member threshold!
Interest in Sustainable Finance is growing What is “Sustainable Finance”? A working definition is: A financial system that takes into account environmental, social and governance considerations to ensure long term sustainability of the human economy.
You can imagine that with a scope and ambition that sweeping, the devil hidden in the details will be of gargantuan size. The definitions of so-called ESG factors, the incorporation of sustainability into business strategies, the governance, policies and risk management applicable to ESG Risks, the ESG and climate-related disclosures and the development of “green” financial products are all topics that combine urgency, complexity and potentially dramatic impact.
Sustainability is frequently depicted as an emissions curve to bend, or a temperature threshold not to exceed. A useful visual model is to see sustainability as a surface of possibilities. Achieving environmental objectives still allows widely differing choices that may not all be equally desirable.
Bending the Curve - Sustainability Conceptualized as a One Dimensional Exercise The opening of the Global Scenario Group report “Bending the Curve: Toward Global Sustainability” by Paul Raskin, Gilberto Gallopin, Pablo Gutman, Al Hammond and Rob Swart, published in 1998 goes as follows:
Over the last few centuries, a mere heartbeat of historic time, humanity has moved to the brink of a new evolutionary milestone - the planetary phase of civilization.
In this archive post we discuss a number of financial terms whose precise meaning is frequently intentionally or unintentionally obscured. As a result those terms may, like a Rorschach Blot, mean different things to different people. Unlike this famous psychological test, ambiguity in weighty financial matters can have adverse consequences.
According to wikipedia Conflation is the merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, opinions, etc., into one, often in error. This may lead to misunderstandings, as the fusion of distinct subjects might obscure analysis of relationships which are emphasized by contrasts. Why does conflation happen in the first place? There are several possible factors which in some contexts may be co-existing and overlapping:
gratuitous (over)simplification driven by laziness or habit literacy gaps in either the originator or the receiver of information an objective to frame, mislead or otherwise be economical with the truth In this blog post we discuss a number of interrelated financial terms whose precise meaning is frequently intentionally or unintentionally obscured.
Risk Management means different things to different people. In this post we explore some truths about professional risk management that highlight both the challenges it is facing as a discipline and the significant role it can play towards a sustainable future
9 Things they do not tell you about Risk Management 1. Risks don’t fall from the Sky. They are generated by other People Informal Risk Management has been practiced by individuals since time immemorial. This is the domain of intuitive decision-making, assessing a situation on the spot and taking immediate action to avoid obvious risks.
Over aeons such empirical risk management has collected a treasure trove of heuristics, rules of thumb and colorful Risk Management One-Liners such as: There is never only one cockroach.
We explore a variety of distinct uses of graph structures in data science. We review various important graph types and sketch their linkages and relationships. The review provides an operational guide towards a better overall understanding of those powerful tools
Course Objective Graphs (and the related concept of Networks) have emerged from a relative mathematical and physics niches to become mainstream models for describing and interpreting various phenomena. The objective of the course is to review various important graph types as they are increasingly explored in data science and sketch their linkages and relationships (a graph of graphs!).
It is not meant to be a rigorous mathematical or computer science classification of graphs but rather an operational guide towards a better overall understanding of those powerful tools.
Data Types are a fundamental building block of data science Data science is about data, but data are not simple and tame beasts. They have character and attitude, which can cause a lot of friction between them and the data scientist. There is a lot of sweat and tears involved when confronting data, but data scientists can do worse than know how to handle in particular Data Type quirks. Namely, a good fraction of data science involves not modelling data, not transforming data, not even cleaning data but simply goading data around the right containers, providing them with the right stage that fits their character.
What is the future of stress testing? To speculate on the future of Stress Testing we need first a basic definition what stress testing is. Broadly speaking, the goal of Stress Testing is to assess how a system would behave under adverse conditions that - while not the most likely outcome with the knowledge of today - are within the realm of the plausible.
There are, broadly speaking, two types of stress testing: The Real stress testing version and Hypothetical stress testing version.
Introduction What is FOSDEM? FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized event centered on free and open-source software development (with a geographic focus on the European open source ecosystems / projects). FOSDEM is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software.
FOSDEM is held annually since 2001, usually during the first weekend of February, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles Solbosch campus in the southeast of Brussels, Belgium.
Risk, Randomness, Uncertainty and other Ambiguous Terms Uncertainty versus Risk is a popular discussion topic among risk managers, especially after major risk management disasters. The debate can get really hairy and drift into deep philosophical areas about the nature of knowledge etc. Yet the significance of having an as clear as possible language toolkit around these terms should not be underestimated. Practical risk management typically shuns too deep excursions into the meaning of things, yet that is not quite compatible with the use of sophisticated methods and tools (such as a Risk Model ) that assumes an understanding of the scope and limitations of “knowledge”.
Is the size of global debt truly “astronomical”? The notion of astronomical numbers and figures is quite frequently seeping in everyday language when large quantities of something are encountered in “normal” life. The strict definition of astronomical is obviously something of, or relating to, astronomy and astronomical observations but in common usage it also denotes something enormously or inconceivably large. This is, of course, because astronomical figures are inconceivably large!
Using a simplified version of the rules of the US Electoral College system we illustrate how the use of Monte Carlo techniques allows exploring systems that show combinatorial explosion
The role of simulation in risk management and decision support A Simulation is a simplified imitation of a process or system that represents with some fidelity its operation over time. In the context of risk management and decision support simulation can be a very powerful tool as it allows us to assess potential outcomes in a systematic way and explore what-if questions in ways that might otherwise be not feasible. Simulation is used when the underlying model is too complex to yield explicit analytic models (An analytic model is one can be “solved” exactly or with standard numerical methods, for example resulting in a formula).
What is Risk Compensation? Risk Compensation is a behavioral model of human attitudes towards risk which suggests that people might adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk. It follows that, depending on the strength of the effect, that it might counteract and even annul the impact of risk mitigation, if the updated attitude and behavior modifies the actual underlying risk
Examples of potential risk compensation effects abound A prominent example of potential risk compensation in recent times that established the concept in more formal terms in public policy debates concerned the beneficial role of safety belts in automobiles.
Agent-Based Models The origins and early years According to Wikipedia an agent-based model (ABM) is
ABM: class of computational models for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual or collective entities such as organizations or groups) with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. A cellular automaton is a particular class of ABM. It is a discrete dynamical model used and studied in a variety of fields: computer science, mathematics, physics, complexity science, theoretical biology among others.
A survey of existing definitions of risk When looking up the meaning of Risk we are confronted with a surprising situation. There is no satisfying and authoritative general purpose one-line definition that we can adopt without second thoughts. Let us start with the standard dictionary definitions:
The online Merriam Webster Dictionary defines risk as the possibility of loss or injury The online Cambridge Dictionary opines that risk means the possibility of something bad happening The Oxford English (Concise, Hardcover!
What do people talk about at FOSDEM 2020 Introduction FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development. It is aimed at developers and anyone interested in the free and open-source software movement. It aims to enable developers to meet and to promote the awareness and use of free and open-source software. FOSDEM is held annually since 2001, usually during the first weekend of February, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles Solbosch campus in the southeast of Brussels, Belgium.
What is a Risk Taxonomy? There are various formal definitions of risk taxonomies (and we will go over those below), but it might be useful to first look at a very intuitive example of a risk taxonomy: the classification of fire hazards (also known as fire classes)
Everybody knows (or should know!) that the different types of fire (which is the underlying Risk in this context) cannot be treated the same way because they respond in different ways to the substances used to suppress the fire.
The new IFRS 9 financial reporting standard IFRS 9 (and the closely related CECL) is a brand new financial reporting standard developed and approved by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB).
Strictly speaking IFRS 9 concerns only the accounting and reporting of financial instruments (e.g. bank loans and similar credit products). Yet the introduction of the IFRS 9 standard has significant repercussions beyond financial reporting, and touches e.g., bank risk management as well.
