Master Meetings

16.05.2023

Corporate Banking

This course presents state-of-the art concepts of finance theory and applies them to practical corporate financing issues. The theoretical part of the course will briefly review standard corporate financing theory, then move on to the concepts of asymmetric information and agency costs, and how they play into the practical issue of raising long-term funds for a company.

Risk Management

We begin by defining the various types of financial risks and stress the need for their management through the analysis of losses and defaults of financial institutions in the recent past. We next turn to the computation of Value-at-Risk measures for portfolios of equity, bond, and option positions. We discuss the estimation of the main inputs surrounding the calculation of VaR, and elaborate on models for time-varying volatility and correlations. We cover both local-valuation models based on derivatives, as well as full-valuation models such as historical simulation and Monte Carlo methods. We also discuss alternative metrics to VaR and Extreme Value Theory. Finally, we examine models for liquidity and operational risk management.

Machine Learning

The course will address the following topics: Supervised learning: linear and nonlinear models for regression and prediction, statistical theory of learning, feature extraction and model selection. Deep learning: architectures including autoencoders, convolutional neural networks and learning procedures. Model performance assessment: cross validation, k-fold cross validation, leave-one-out, bootstrap.

Derivatives

The program of the course comprises an introduction to derivatives and three main building blocks: 1) Mechanics of futures markets; hedging strategies using futures; pricing of forwards and futures on stocks, stock indices, currencies, commodities. 2) Mechanics of options markets; properties of stock options; trading strategies involving options; option pricing with binomial trees; option pricing with the Black-Scholes-Merton model; options on stock indices and currencies; the Greeks and hedging of options; 3) Interest rates; bond pricing; forwards and futures on interest rates; interest rate swaps; currency swaps; valuation of swaps.

Banking Strategies & Wealth Management

The course provides an introduction to the elaboration of a Strategy for a Financial Institution, starting from the understanding of the financial environment and the macro trends characterizing the banking processes, down to client’s segments, products and services, and business areas (retail banking, private banking, commercial banking, investment banking and asset management). Complementary to finance and investments tracks, this course mainly focuses on a holistic, cross-disciplinary wealth management approach, and provides content on wealth governance, family advisory, wealth structuring and succession planning. Moreover, it adopts a value chain based approach, analyzing and challenging the current business model while re-assessing the role of the relationship management.