SPEAKER SERIES - THE FUTURE OF FINANCE

EDHEC SPEAKER SERIES
“THE FUTURE OF FINANCE”

Is “green the new black” when it comes to Finance? How could the financial sector address climate change, retirement and other key economic issues in the coming years? Is Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence really the next frontier in investment?

EDHEC Business School has launched a new online monthly speaker series on “The Future of Finance”. The objective is to address the most recent advances in the financial industry and discuss how finance can be a powerful tool for tackling key economic and social challenges. To do so, this series gather all year long international renowned industry experts and academic scholars reflecting the research culture and intellectual commitment of EDHEC Business School #makeanimpact. The targeted audience is the current EDHEC Business School finance graduate students, the EDHEC alumni, and the members of the enlarged EDHEC community and guests.

Season 2 - EDHEC online Speaker Series “The Future of Finance”

Forthcoming Speakers

Jean Boissinot, Deputy Director - Banque de France

Topic    Green Finance

Date     Tuesday, 14 February 2023

Time    6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

Nick Baltas, Managing Director - Goldman Sachs

Topic    Institutional Trends in Systematic Investing

Date     Tuesday, 28 February 2023

Time     6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

Past Speakers

Topic    Navigating the world of ESG ratings

Date     Tuesday, 13 December 2022

Time    6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

This talk will give an overview of the construction of ESG ratings and show that there is much disagreement between different ESG rating providers. As measurement is one of the most important drivers of the disagreement between raters, Florian will show how measurement errors affect ESG portfolio construction and asset pricing.  The talk will end with an analysis of how ratings actually matter economically.

Topic    Quantifying Economic Narratives for Financial Markets - A New Approach to Asset Pricing

Date     Tuesday, 15 November 2022

Time    6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

This talk introduces a systematic approach to quantifying economic narratives based on traditional and social media. Asset-price risk exposures are measured for hundreds of attention-derived narratives, including macroeconomic, ESG, crypto, and emerging trends. Narrative betas can be used to gain or hedge portfolio exposure to narratives by constructing dedicated basket portfolios of narrative-sensitive assets. The framework introduced here extends the traditional paradigm of factor models to a more general class of intangible factors combined with behavioral elements pertaining to investor attention.

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Topic     Passion Assets

Date       Tuesday, 18th October 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We will hear from William Goetzmann, Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Management Studies and Faculty Director of the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management, about what research has discovered about art as investment.

Prestige items have been a store of wealth and a symbol of power throughout human history. Now as in the past they are also typically a part of the portfolio of many wealthy investors. William will discuss how the new world of digital, non-fungible art has emerged to challenge traditional contemporary art collecting.

Topic     The Future of Institutional Investing

Date       Tuesday, 13th September 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We will hear from Marcos Lopez de Prado, Global Head - Quantitative Research and Development at the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Professor of Practice at Cornell University, about the reasons why factor investing research remains at a pre-scientific stage, and the need for financial researchers and asset managers to embrace scientific protocols.

Topic     Climate Finance: from Climate Risk to Financial Risk

Date       Thursday, 5 May 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We will hear from Stefano Battiston - Professor of Finance at the University of Zurich, Professor of Economics at University of Venice, and Lead Author of the Chapter on Investment and Finance of sixth IPCC Assessment report - about climate stress test and the analysis of financial risks and opportunities of climate mitigation. The first climate stress-test of European banks will be published later this year. Will they make up for the expectations? The recently published IPCC report says it all: it's now or never. Humanity is at a road junction between starting now a low-carbon transition or facing irreversible and growing impacts of climate change. So what does this means for the financial sector? 

Well, of course the low-carbon transition could take place in an orderly way, with no big changes on asset prices. But will it do so? In fact, there is a real possibility of large adjustments in asset valuation if market expectations come to internalise the implications of the decarbonization scenarios. Hence the importance of using adequately the climate scenarios when conduct climate stress-tests.

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Topic     Quant investing: today and tomorrow

Date       Thursday, 28 April 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We will hear from Weili Zhou, Head of Quant Equity Research at Robeco, about the opportunities and challenges for quant investing in today’s world.
Next to that, from a practitioner’s perspective, she will share her insights on the added value of advanced technologies (e.g. ML and NLP) and alternative datasets (e.g. news flow and social network).

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Topic     DEFI: the Future of Finance?

Date       Thursday, 31 March 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We will hear from Campbell Harvey, Professor of Finance at Duke University on the opportunities and risks of decentralized finance (DeFi). DeFi is a blockchain-based technology that seeks to disrupt traditional channels of savings, lending, exchange and insurance.
In the world of DeFi, all value is tokenized. DeFi is an integral part of both Web3 and the metaverse. While the opportunities are considerable, it is important to understand the risks that this new technology faces.

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Topic     Will Private Markets Kill Them All?

Date       Thursday, 24 March 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We heard from Ludovic Phalippou, Professor of Financial Economics, Head of Finance Accounting and Management Economics academic area at University of Oxford Said Business School, about the complexity of private markets. Home to a stockpile of mythologies, war-stories and fantasies, private markets are shrouded in complex jargon, hard to penetrate, controversial, and yet partying like it is 1999. They are now everywhere. Taking the investment world by storm. Just passed the $10 trillion mark for Xmas, up from less than $1 trillion just 20 years ago. Went through 2008 and COVID-19 undented. Public markets are so last century – Can they actually die altogether? Or will a hybrid world emerge?

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Topic     SPACs: (almost) everything you need to know about SPACs

Date       Thursday, 24 February 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We will hear from Jay Ritter, Professor of Finance, Warrington College of Business how Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) have boomed in the U.S., with over 600 SPAC IPOs raising more than $160 billion in 2021 alone.

These shell companies then search for a private operating company to merge with, in the process injecting cash and listing it on an exchange. Thus, a SPAC merger is an alternative to a traditional IPO for the opearting company. SPACs have been very controversial, due to poor post-merger returns and the middlemen (the SPAC sponsor and underwriters) taking a big slice of the pie. Jay will discuss the economic rationale for some of the features that are used.

Topic     The Odyssey of Sovereign Sustainability

Date       Thursday, 17 February 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We will hear from Eric Bouyé, Manager and Head of Product, Knowledge and Research at World Bank Treasury about the integration of environment and climate risk for sovereign investors, including central banks’ reserve managers.
Most central banks or risk-averse investors still invest primarily in sovereign, supranational or agency bonds for the management of their assets, offering a limited scope to achieve sustainability objectives. Eric will talk about solutions, ongoing initiatives (e.g., NGFS), and how Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) – World Bank, EIB, etc. – have been playing a role in bridging the gap between sustainable and development finance towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

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Topic     Sustainable Alpha: doing well by doing good?

Date      Thursday, 27 January 2022
Time      6:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Paris Time

We will hear from Andrew Ang, Managing Director and Head of Factor-based strategies at BlackRock how sustainable datasets can be incorporated in style factors and generate alpha.
Sustainable data include non-financial data from social media, influencers, news flow, satellite images, web scraping, and other non-traditional sources. Additionally, Andrew will also discuss net-zero carbon portfolio alignment strategies that have become recently prominent in the investment space.

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