PRMIA Announces Champions of the 2024 Risk Management Challenge
On March 22, 2024, ten finalist teams competed at the MathWorks headquarters in Natick, Massachusetts in the international championship round of the PRMIA Risk Management Challenge (PRMC). The teams represented undergraduate and graduate students from colleges and universities across the globe, including Canada, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Russia, and the United States.
Congratulations go out to the 2024 Risk Management Challenge champions, BossTon from The University of Hong Kong, with team members Ziqi Xu, Muhammad Hussain, and Muhammad Mubeen. The champions were awarded $10,000 in prize money for the team and were offered fee waivers to pursue the Professional Risk Manager (PRM™) Designation.
Congratulations also to the second-place team, RiskMen from Corvinus University of Budapest, with team members Ákos Takács, András Babos, György Gáspár, and Zsombor Nagy. The second-place finishers were also awarded fee waivers for the PRM™ Designation. The ten finalist teams received PRMIA Sustaining Memberships for each team member.
Thank you to our global sponsor, MathWorks, for its support of the 2024 Challenge, as well as QuantUniversity for offering in-kind scholarships to the international championship team. PRMIA is also grateful to the Toronto regional sponsor RBC.
Competition Overview
Thirty-three teams representing a total of 130 students competed in this year's Challenge. Eight PRMIA chapters hosted regional round events worldwide to narrow down the field to ten finalist teams.
This year the students analyzed a case study that addressed the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was a prominent financial institution that specialized in providing banking and financial services to start-up, technology, life sciences, healthcare, and venture capital firms. Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, SVB played a major role in entrepreneurial activity in Silicon Valley and similar markets around the world.
MATLAB Challenge
As a part of the competition, teams participated in a MATLAB Challenge. Teams were tasked with a case study with focus on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. During the first half of 2023, there were a number of bank failures in the U.S., notably SVB and also the collapse of Credit Suisse headquarters in Switzerland. The teams were tasked to use modeling to help solve four problems provided by MathWorks. The top finisher of the MATLAB Challenge was Team RiskGPT, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. Team members will receive prizes from our global sponsor, MathWorks.
We would like to extend a special thank you to our 2024 International round judges:
Emilian Belev, CFA, APRM, Head, Enterprise Risk Analytics, Northfield
Dr Andrea Calef, Lecturer in Economics, School of Economics, University of East Anglia (UK)
Carl Densem, Risk Manager Financial Markets, Rabobank, PRMIA Global Council of Regional Directors
Dan diBartolomeo, Regional Director, PRMIA Boston
Yuchen Dong, Senior Application Engineer, MathWorks
Dr Ahmed Hammad, MBA, DBA, Senior Credit Risk Manager, National Bank of Egypt, NBE
Russ Hovanec, Northfield Information Services, Inc.
Simon Hillard, Steering Committee Member PRMIA, London, and recently resigned as Head of Risk at SMBC London
Cleo Li, Co-Regional Director of PRMIA Toronto, Ex-Institutional Equity Trader, BMO Capital Markets
John Minahan, CFA, Independent Consultant
Monika Smatralova, Director - Portfolio Manager, Internal Audit - Barclays Europe at Barclays, Regional Director, PRMIA Ireland
Deb Williams, Senior Director, Middle Office Solutions, Asset Servicing at BNY Mellon, PRMIA Boston Steering Committee member