Portfolio Management

Equinox 0.7 release focuses on scope 2 (electricity) emissions

Equinox 0.7 release focuses on scope 2 (electricity) emissions

New data models introduced in this release of Equinox cater to the requirement of integrating energy attribute certificate information into the portfolio database.

Reading Time: 3 min.
GHG Accounting offers a means of measuring the direct and indirect emissions to the Earth’s Biosphere of CO2 and its equivalent gases from industrial and other activities. GHG Accounting is a rapidly developing area that has come to receive increased focus in the context of accelerating Climate Change. Given that the generation of electricity and heat accounts for around a third of global GHG emissions electricity consumers have incentives to proactively reduce those emissions by reducing electricity demand, or by shifting energy supply by procuring alternative lower-carbon or renewable resources.
Mathematical Representations of Credit Portfolio Data

Mathematical Representations of Credit Portfolio Data

What do we mean by credit data? This post is a discussion around mathematical terminology and concepts that are useful in the context of working with credit data, taking us from network graph representations of credit systems to commonly used reference data sets

Reading Time: 27 min.
Definition of Credit Data What do we mean by credit data? For our purposes Credit Data is any well-defined dataset that has direct applications in the assessment of the Credit Risk of an individual or an organization, or, more generally, a dataset that allows the application of data driven Credit Portfolio Management policies. The appearance of credit data is quite familiar to practitioners: A spreadsheet, or a table in a database, with a number of columns and rows full of all sorts of information about borrowers and loans.
First public release of the Solstice simulation framework

First public release of the Solstice simulation framework

Solstice is a flexible open source economic network simulator. Its primary outcomes are quantitative analyses of the behavior of economic systems under uncertainty. In this post we provide a first overall description of Solstice to accompany the first public release.

Reading Time: 5 min.
Modeling economic networks and their dynamics Economic networks are the primary abstractions though which we can conceptualize the state (condition) and evolution of economic interactions. This simply reflects the fact that human economies are quite fundamentally systems of interacting actors (or nodes in a network) with transient or more permanent relations between them. In practice the network character of an economy is frequently suppressed or under-emphasized and does not play a particularly important role.
How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 4

How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 4

In the fourth part of this series we approach Green Public Procurement as a Sustainable Portfolio Management task and explore how open data can support this mission

Reading Time: 9 min.
Introduction In this fourth and final installment we will discuss how the data framework we have developed thus far can be mapped into classic portfolio management concepts and categories, and thus, how one can articulate the concept of sustainable procurement management on a portfolio basis. The concepts and analytic methodologies of financial portfolio management1 can significantly enhance the toolkit available to practitioners and, in sense, connects the domain of Green Public Procurement to other ongoing initiatives in broader Sustainable Finance.
How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 3

How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 3

In the third part of this series we illustrate how one may assign greenhouse gas emissions to public procurement using environmentally extended input-output models

Reading Time: 10 min.
Introduction This is the third in a series of posts where we explore the role of Open Data and Open Source in enabling and accelerating the broad based effort towards Green Public Procurement (GPP). In this third installment we will link procurement entities to private sector sellers and, through the sectoral profile of the procurement contract, (CPV category) we will infer the amount of CO2 emissions that can be attributed to these activities.
How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 2

How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 2

In the second part of this series we explore how to construct an economic network representation of the public procurement universe

Reading Time: 10 min.
Introduction This is the second in a series of posts where we explore the role of Open Data and Open Source in enabling and accelerating the broad based effort towards Green Public Procurement (GPP). Recap of the Previous Post Part 1 - Overview In the first part of this series we motivated and defined the scope of a study that explores Public Procurement data. We discussed the meaning of the main relevant terms (Open Data, Open Source, Green Public Procurement) and briefly reviewed the current state and challenges of the latter in EU context.
How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 1

How Open Data and Open Source can support Green Public Procurement - Part 1

In the first part of this series we survey the TED procurement data landscape to build the context in which we will explore the relevance of this open data set for green public procurement

Reading Time: 13 min.
Introduction In a series of posts we will explore the role of Open Data and Open Source in enabling and accelerating the broad based effort towards Green Public Procurement (GPP). There are several important (and possibly obscure) terms in this sentence, so our first order of business will be to unpack them. What is Public Procurement Let us start with the term Public Procurement which will be the main domain of interest in this study.
EU Datathon 2022 preselection for the Equinox platform

EU Datathon 2022 preselection for the Equinox platform

We are very happy to announce that our EU Datathon 2022 proposal based on the equinox platform has been pre-selected to enter the formal stage of the competition

Reading Time: 2 min.
What is the EU Datathon? The EU Datathon is an annual Open Data competition organised by the Publications Office of the European Union since 2017. The competitions are organised to create new value for citizens through innovation and promoting the use of open data, in particular the datasets available on the official portal for European data. Every year, EU Datathon calls for innovators from around the world to come up with new ways of using open data to address important societal and environmental challenges, with the condition that they use at least one of the thousands of data sets published on data.
Equinox 0.4 release focuses on green public procurement functionality

Equinox 0.4 release focuses on green public procurement functionality

On Earth Day 2022 we are happy to release a significant update of Equinox, the open source platform supporting sustainable portfolio management

Reading Time: 1 min.
Equinox 0.4 Release Equinox is an open source platform that supports holistic risk management and reporting in the context of Sustainable Portfolio Management. The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards, for example the GHG Protocol (accounting for Project based, Corporate and City-Wide greenhouse gas emissions), the IPCC Emissions Factor database and further reference data, the PCAF attribution methodologies (and more) to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios.
Input-Output Models as Graph Networks

Input-Output Models as Graph Networks

We discuss the relation of economic input-output models with graph theory and networks

Reading Time: 15 min.
Motivation Fig 1. An economic network as a graph. The economy is a complex tangle of various agents that interact via transactions (sales and purchases) and contracts (lending, investing). In recent times more and more techniques from graph theory and network science are brought to bear on economic analysis. On the other hand, ever since the seminal contributions of Leontief, Input-Output Models (IO) have been widely used to describe economic relationships between economic actors (e.
Integrating the IPCC Emissions Factors Database Into Equinox

Integrating the IPCC Emissions Factors Database Into Equinox

In the latest update of the Equinox Project we discuss the integration of reference data an in particular greenhouse gas emissions factors as catalogued in the IPCC Emissions Factors database (EFDB).

Reading Time: 2 min.
Equinox is an open source platform that supports the holistic risk management and reporting of major sustainable finance projects (the financing of projects with material physical footprint) such as project finance. Equinox aims to integrate in the database a number reference databases that facilitate tasks of sustainable portfolio management. In the current focus such reference material concerns the emissions factors for various processes and activities. In the latest (Solstice Day!) update of the Equinox Project we discuss the integration of reference data an in particular greenhouse gas emissions factors as catalogued in the IPCC Emissions Factors database (EFDB).
Open Risk White Paper: Sustainable Portfolio Management - Attribution and Allocation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Open Risk White Paper: Sustainable Portfolio Management - Attribution and Allocation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

We develop an analytic framework that synthesizes current approaches to sustainable portfolio management in the context of addressing climate change. We discuss the different required information layers, approaches to emissions accounting, attribution and forward-looking limit frameworks implementing carbon budget constraints.

Reading Time: 3 min.
The frontpage graphic is adapted from Steffen et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet”. Science (2015). The Planetary Boundaries concept was proposed in 2009 by this group of Earth system and environmental scientists. The group suggested that finding a “safe operating space for humanity” is a precondition for sustainable development. The framework is based on scientific evidence that human actions since the Industrial Revolution have become the main driver of global environmental change.
White Paper 11, Sustainable Portfolio Management of GHG

White Paper 11, Sustainable Portfolio Management of GHG

Reading Time: 0 min.
Open Risk White Paper 11: Sustainable Portfolio Management: Attribution and Allocation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions We develop an analytic framework that synthesizes current approaches to sustainable portfolio management in the context of addressing climate change. We discuss the different required information layers, approaches to emissions accounting, attribution and forward-looking limit frameworks implementing carbon budget constraints. Download Download OpenRiskWP11_021221 Citation @ARTICLE{OpenRiskWhitePaper11, author = {P. Papadopoulos}, year = {2021}, note = {\href{https://www.
White Paper 10, Concentration, diversity in economic networks

White Paper 10, Concentration, diversity in economic networks

Reading Time: 1 min.
Open Risk White Paper 10: Connecting the Dots: Concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in economic networks In this second Open Risk White Paper on Connecting the Dots we examine measures of concentration, diversity, inequality and sparsity in the context of economic systems represented as network (graph) structures. We adopt a stylized description of economies as property graphs and illustrate how relevant concepts can be represented in this language. We explore in some detail data types representing economic network data and their statistical nature which is critical in their use in concentration analysis.
Introduction to the EBA NPL Templates

Introduction to the EBA NPL Templates

Reading Time: 3 min.
Summary The Open Risk Academy course NPL270672 is a CrashCourse introducing the EBA NPL Templates. Content We start with the motivation for the templates and the domain of credit data (to which NPL data belongs). We discuss three core classes that capture the essence of lending operations from a lenders point of view (Counterparty, Loan, Collateral). Next we explore classes that capture events in the lending relationship lifecycle (which we term NPL Scenarios).
Equinox: a Platform for Sustainable Project Finance Risk Management

Equinox: a Platform for Sustainable Project Finance Risk Management

On Earth Day 2021 we are happy to launch Equinox, an open source platform supporting sustainable project finance

Reading Time: 5 min.
Equinox is an open source platform that supports holistic risk management and reporting of Sustainable Finance (Sustainable Portfolio Management). The platform integrates geospatial information with applicable regulatory and industry standards from EBA, PCAF and Equator Principles to provide a holistic view of the footprint of both individual projects and portfolios, in particular of project finance investments. Motivation Sustainability (understood in environmental, economic and social terms) is emerging as an undisputed constraint that will shape future human activity and more specifically how the financial system facilitates and empowers economic life.
Marking Pi Day 2021 With a Raspberry Pi Docker Image for OpenNPL

Marking Pi Day 2021 With a Raspberry Pi Docker Image for OpenNPL

We celebrate Pi Day 2021 releasing an ARM version of the openNPL platform that is suitable for the Raspberry Pi

Reading Time: 2 min.
Celebrating Pi Day 2021 Pi Day is celebrated every year on March 14th. The reason of course is that the day is denoted in some calendars as (3/14), which evokes of 3.14, the first three digits of “π”. A thin excuse maybe but sufficient for the true believers to join along! The occasion represents an annual opportunity for mathematics and science enthusiasts to recite the infinite charms of Pi, including its irrationality, to talk to friends and family about math and its uses, and, when everything else fails, simply eat pie.
Stress Testing of the Future - A view from 2031

Stress Testing of the Future - A view from 2031

What is the future of stress testing? We speculate on how stress testing might look like in 2031

Reading Time: 13 min.
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.
Monte Carlo Simulation of the US Electoral College

Monte Carlo Simulation of the US Electoral College

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

Reading Time: 9 min.
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).
openNPL 0.2 REST API implementation

openNPL 0.2 REST API implementation

The 0.2 release of openNPL exposes a RESTful API that provides easy standardized online access to NPL credit portfolio data conforming to the EBA NPL templates

Reading Time: 4 min.
openNPL 0.2 release The open source openNPL platform supports the management of standardized credit portfolio data for non-performing loans. In this respect it implements the detailed European Banking Authority NPL loan templates. openNPL aims to be at the same time easy to integrate in human workflows (using a familiar web interface) and integrate into automated (computer driven) workflows. The latest (0.2) release exposes a REST API that offers machine oriented access using, what is by now, the most established mechanism for achieving flexible online data transfers.