Let’s discover together the Risk Management of a major Corporate and Investment Bank, where no fewer than 15 Margos are working! Yassine, a Java developer in liquidity risk, and Florette, Business Analyst in counterparty risk calculation, share their experiences.

In short…  

The Risk Management is in charge of the creation and the management of the whole risk metrics : market risk, liquidity risk, credit risk. This is a very strategic department for Banking, with daily new challenges: adapting to face regulatory requirements (FRTB for example), which demand more and more precise indicator calculations, and answering traders’ needs so they can manage their activity in real time.

The Department is divided into several teams. The first one focuses on counterparty risk, another one on liquidity risk, one on market risk, one on P&L calculation and the last one is a transversal team of functional architects, in charge of ensuring the IT consistency for the entire application system of the Department.

What is your team activity?

Florette : Within the counterparty risk team, we are in charge of collateral management. We work on different projects to face new regulatory requirements : EMIR DFA (a new regulation recommending  IM segregation), Basel III, CCP, Independent Amount. Specifically we work on a project allowing a better collateral accounting in risk management.

Yassine : I’m a Java developer for the risk market and liquidity team. We are working on an application simulating different test scenarios for all the deals of the Group and providing liquidity ratios to the users.

And what’s the little extra you like in your job?

Florette : I can both specialize in collateral management and keep on evolving in a global and complex environment, which demands versatility on different issues.

Another asset is that the management team really wants to improve working methods. We receive training in project management and agile methodologies.  

Yassine : I love the fact that, in risk liquidity, technical constraints are very challenging. Users need to access a lot of data. It means we have to work on very sophisticated Big Data issues, using Olap cubes and Active Pivot. We are pushing the limits of Java by making it run on a device with 1500 gigs of ram. Our goal is to allow the users to surf  data in real time with the granularity level they want.

The team atmosphere is also great, we all get along very well, we’re happy to go to work in the morning. We even see each other outside office hours.