Welcome to the Financial Risks International Forum
organised by the Louis Bachelier Institute in Paris every spring.
The theme of the 10th edition is Fintech, which is very popular
but something we want to approach from a research point of view
which is less common, a lot more rare.
Fintechs are small- and medium-sized businesses that are shifting towards
being more digital, more innovative, more blockchain, etc.
My name is Bruno Biais. I'm a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research
posted at the Toulouse School of Economics, working on economy and finance.
I was awarded a prize with co-authors Florian Heider
and Marie Hoerova from the European Central Bank
for our work on clearing houses. A clearing house is a place
where all transactions between different market operators are centralised,
to ensure that there is no default, and that the parties do what they promised.
It is vital for the stability and security of the market.
I am Claudio Fontana, lecturer at the Probability Laboratory
at the Université Paris-Diderot.
I was lucky enough to win the Europlace Institute of Finance prize
for a piece of work I completed with Christa Cuchiero and Alessandro Gnoatto
on modelling the multiple-curve markets of interest rates.
The Europlace Institute of Finance prize is an extraordinary reward for the work
my colleagues and I have done, and it is also a very valuable opportunity
to establish new connections with the financial industry.
It is where all the researchers, practitioners and journalists meet,
and so is a way of bringing together approaches that are often more practical
or more involved in theory that can, I believe, be mutually beneficial.
The conference is extremely important for young researchers,
especially to be able to feed on new lines of research offered by the finance sector.
Contrarily, for the finance sector, it is a very valuable opportunity
to find out answers to complex problems that are both simple and rigorous.
Congratulations to the speakers and hats off to the three prizewinners.
Thank you to all the participants and see you next year.