Data and Technology Are Reshaping the Risk Profession

To assess how rapidly the field of risk management - and the skills required of risk professionals - are changing, Frank Roncey looks through the lens of data.

“The way we understand data, the way we understand models, the way we manipulate data . . . the people who are joining the risk profession have to be data savvy,” says Roncey, group chief risk officer of BNP Paribas, in GARP's video interview series on career insights from risk leaders. The critical importance of data and the complexities of managing it underscore how “skills that are required today were not looked at this way five years ago.”

He believes that data and technology expertise go hand-in-hand, to the extent that people coming into the risk profession “need to be at ease with coding, because this is going to be an important part of what they are going to do.”

Whether in the form of artificial intelligence, machine learning or big data, new technologies present “opportunities to do our job better,” says Roncey, who started his career at Paribas in Paris in 1989, and was group chief credit risk officer and global head of retail and corporate risk management in the group risk management department before becoming group CRO in 2014. He is a member of the group executive committee and of the GARP board of trustees, and he participated in the keynote CRO panel at the GARP 20th Risk Convention in February.

“We are there to anticipate risk, to identify risk, to detect risk, to control risk - and eventually to report the main risks that the institution carries,” Roncey says. “To do all this, which is the normal risk management life cycle, new technologies will be very useful. We will be much more effective and efficient in doing it.”

For the previous career insights interview, with former Federal Reserve Bank of New York president William Dudley, click here.

Video production by DeLisa White