About Rory Roberts

The Gap

Over twenty years, I've held risk roles at six institutions across banking and insurance — from quant analysis to front-office dealing to enterprise risk management. At every single one, I found the same gap: billions invested in measuring and managing risk, almost nothing invested in finding it in the first place.

The measurement functions are always well-resourced — credit modelling teams, market risk systems running millions of simulations, operational risk databases cataloguing every loss event. But the question that precedes all of that — what are the risks? — is typically addressed in a two-day workshop once a year, producing a spreadsheet that becomes a risk register no one revisits until the regulator asks.

The Experience

I started in quantitative risk — leading a Basel II derivatives pricing team, then pricing CDOs and mortgage-backed securities in the months before the financial crisis made clear exactly what poor risk identification looks like. I spent nearly a decade at a major global insurer, first as a front-office dealer trading FX, money markets, derivatives, and options, then as Solvency II Project Manager implementing the regulatory capital framework across the group and its European subsidiaries.

In 2016, I was appointed Global Head of Risk Identification at a European G-SIB. I built a team of seven across three countries and designed the group-wide risk identification and assessment framework from scratch — covering APAC, EMEA, and integrated with the US CCAR process. It was the first time I had a mandate to build the process I'd always seen missing.

In 2023, I took that methodology to a major international banking group as Risk Identification Lead within Enterprise Risk Management. The focus was integration — embedding risk identification directly into the ICAAP and ILAAP processes so that capital and liquidity adequacy assessments were built on a rigorous, documented methodology rather than last year's register. The pilot programme validated the approach and identified critical risks the existing process had missed.

The Mission

I founded EON Risk Services in 2020 because this methodology shouldn't have to be built from scratch every time a bank decides to take risk identification seriously. The process I developed across multiple institutions and regulatory regimes — grounded in ISO 31000, COSO ERM, and the Basel framework — should be a standard any bank, of any size, can adopt and defend to their regulator. So I wrote the book on it.

I hold a B.Sc. in Mathematical Physics from University College Dublin and the Financial Risk Manager (FRM) certification from GARP.

The thread through all of it is a fascination with how complex systems fail — and how to build processes that catch the failures before they happen.