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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”.

Constructing a Global Mobility Index (GMI)

In previous posts (here, and here) we introduced new Open Risk Dashboard functionalities that integrate COVID-19 community mobility data (currently focusing on the datasets provided by Google).

As a reminder, these reports chart over time human mobility trends collected from mobile geolocation data. The granularity is by geography and across different categories of places / activities such as retail and recreation areas, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential areas. Through these data sets we have available (for the first time in history) an overall quantitative view of global mobility (and Mobility Risk )!

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!

The Risk Function Ontology

The Risk Function Ontology is a framework that aims to represent and categorize knowledge about risk management functions using semantic web information technologies. Codenamed RFO codifies the relationship between the various components of a risk management organization. Individuals, teams or even whole departments tasked with risk management exist in some shape or form in most organizations. The ontology allows the definition of risk management roles in more precise terms, which in turn can be used in a variety of contexts: towards better structured actual job descriptions, more accurate description of internal processes and easier inspection of alignement and consistency with risk taxonomies. See also live version and the white paper OpenRiskWP04_061415.

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).

Federated Credit Systems, Part I: Unbundling the Credit Provision Business Model

As an architectural design and information technology approach, federation has received increased attention in domains such as the medical sector (under the name federated analysis), in official statistics (under the name trusted data) and in mass computing devices (smartphones), under the name federated learning.

Using Sankey Diagrams

Sankey Diagrams are a type of flow diagram composed of interconnected arrows. The width of the arrows is proportional to the flow rate. Sankey diagrams are often used in physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology) and engineering but also in economics. They can be used to represent the relative role and significance of various inputs and outputs in a given process.

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.

Risk Management will not be the same going forward: too much is at stake

The summer is over in the Northern Hemisphere - and what an unusual summer has it been! Worldwide the implications and challenges of adjusting to a Covid-19 pandemic are still a major issue, affecting individuals, companies and governments.

openNPL now Available in Dockerized Form

Following up on the first release of openNPL the platform is now available to install using Docker. Running openNPL via docker is the installation option that simplifies the manual process (but a working docker installation is required!).

Docker Hub

You can pull the latest openNPL image from Docker Hub ( This method is recommended if you do not want to mess with the source distribution).

Course Objective

This course is a deep-dive into the structure of visualizations, in particular visualizations of timeseries data. The course is now live at the Academy.

Non-Performing Loans

The covid-19 crisis will certainly impact the concentration of Non-Performing Loans but given the special nature of this economic crisis compared (in particular) with the 2008 financial crisis it is unclear how precisely things will evolve.

In a previous post and white paper (OpenRiskWP07_022616) we discussed the importance of advancing open and transparent methodologies for managing the risks associated with such credit portfolios. Effective management of NPL is also a top regulatory priority. Following calls from the EU Commission and the EU Council to develop data templates to reduce information asymmetries between potential buyers and sellers of NPL, the European Banking Authority (EBA) has developed such standardised data templates.

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

The community mobility reports and OpenCPM

In a previous post we introduced new OpenCPM functionality that integrates COVID-19 community mobility data (currently from Google). The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

The community mobility reports and OpenCPM

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded technology providers (most notably Google and Apple) made available to the public aggregated and anonymized data about human mobility in the crisis period (on the basis of smartphone location data). These Community Mobility Reports provide insights into how mobility patterns changed in response both to pandemic news and policies aimed at combating COVID-19.

Course Content

This course is a CrashProgram (short course) introducing the GeoJSON specification for the encoding of geospatial features. The course is at an introductory technical level. It requires some familiarity with data specifications such as JSON and a very basic knowledge of Python

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.

Course Content

This course is an introduction to the concept of credit contagion. It covers the following topics:

• Contagion Risk Overview and Definition
• Various Contagion Types and Modelling Challenges
• The Simple Contagion Model by Davis and Lo
• Supply Chains Contagion
• Sovereign Contagion

Connecting the Dots: Economic Networks as Property Graphs

We develop a quantitative framework that approaches economic networks from the point of view of contractual relationships between agents (and the interdependencies those generate). The representation of agent properties, transactions and contracts is done in the context of a property graph.

A typical use case for the proposed framework is the study of credit networks.

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: