PRMIA Announces the Champions of the 2020 Risk Management Challenge
30 schools. 58 teams. 219 competitors.
1 International champion team takes home the $10,000 prize!
On April 20, 2020, 12 finalist teams competed virtually in the international championship round of the PRMIA Risk Management Challenge (PRMC). The 12 teams represented undergraduate and graduate students from colleges and universities across the globe: Chicago, Egypt, Hungary, Ireland, Montreal, New York, Russia, Toronto, and Vancouver.
Our congratulations go out to Team 9893 from Baruch College, New York: Alyssa Wei, Li Jin Chen, Kanica Khatri, and Claudio Matteo Lin. The champions were awarded the $10,000 in prize money for the team and were offered fee waivers to pursue the Professional Risk Manager (PRM™) designation. The runner-up team was close, Morpheus from Rutgers University: Hirdai Sawnani, Sai Mohan, Ying Lan and Shiyang Ni. The second-place finishers were also awarded fee waivers for the PRM™ designation, and all 12 of the finalist teams received PRMIA Sustaining Memberships for each team member. A special thanks to QuantUniversity for generously providing in-kind scholarships to all students in the final round to take advantage of the course, Foundations of ML and AI for Financial Professionals.
We were pleased to be able to organize a virtual event when it became apparent the COVID-19 pandemic would prevent a live competition. We would like to recognize and applaud all 58 teams who competed in this year’s Challenge for their dedication and perseverance to collaborate remotely with one another on their case study presentations.
Lauren Tabolinsky, Academic Programs Manager for MathWorks, Risk Management Challenge global sponsor, shares, “Students from around the globe had been working for months on their case solutions to the PRMIA Risk Management Challenge. When cancellation of the in-person finals event became imminent due to COVID-19 restrictions, PRMIA and MathWorks embarked on a collaborative effort to host the competition in a virtual environment. This nimble response to a rapidly evolving situation enabled these dedicated students to reap the benefits of the competition and resulted in a highly successful event for everyone involved."
The international finalists advanced through preliminary and regional round competitions by analyzing risk management issues from a case study focused on the demise of Long-Term Capital Management. Teams evaluated the risk-based performance of the fund and its spectacular fall by issuing recommendations on many levels including trading, governance structure, and regulation and simulating an environment that included central clearing. The top teams from each region were selected to advance to the finals.
The final round virtual event included a panel discussion with the judges about careers in risk management and practical aspects of the role of risk professionals across various industries. Panelists shared personal stories about their career paths as well as insights and advice for pursuing meaningful careers in the risk and finance fields.
As part of the competition, MathWorks sponsored a MATLAB modeling challenge which required students to create an ML algorithm pair trading portfolio that emulated LTCM trades. The top four teams were awarded prizes from MathWorks at the finals event.
We would like to extend a special thank you to our 2020 international round judges:
Emilian Belev, CFA, ARPM, Head, Enterprise Risk Analytics, Northfield Information Services
Petr Chovanec, Director, Business Modeling and Forecasting, UBS
Ahmed Hammad, Credit Risk Manager, National Bank of Egypt
Stuart Kozola, Head of Product Management and Strategy, MathWorks
Sri Krishnamurthy, Founder and CEO, QuantUniversity
Ken Radigan, CEO, PRMIA
Siddharth Sundar, Senior Financial Engineer, MathWorks
The winning team explaining how a CCP would have impacted the liquidity profile for LTCM
Thank you to our global sponsor, MathWorks, for its support of the 2020 Challenge
Thank you to our international finals sponsors
Thank you to our Toronto regional sponsor
