The Financial Risk Management team work with a broad range of financial institutions and large corporate clients, assisting them to manage their exposures to credit risk (i.e. the risk of borrower default) and market risk (i.e. the risk of adverse movements in financial markets).

Both our credit and market risk services are largely quantitative in nature, with our team adept at building and validating a large array of financial models. From a credit risk perspective, these models may be used to predict the likelihood of default or assess the amount of capital to be held by a financial institution. From a market risk perspective, the modelling may look at future potential market price movements and its impact on our client’s business. In addition to financial modelling, our team are experts in credit and market risk regulation (e.g. IFRS9 and Basel III), various programming languages (e.g. R and SAS), financial instruments and financial markets (e.g. FX, interest rate and energy markets).

There is a large amount of variety in the projects that the Financial Risk Management team undertake. As such, there is a large amount of variety in a typical work day. We spend a lot of our time working at our client’s offices, working shoulder to shoulder with them to deliver solutions to their problems. Bigger projects will involve multiple team members collaborating over the best way to approach each task. We have numerous staff who leverage KPMG’s agile working policy to ensure that there is sufficient flexibility in how our projects are completed.

The Financial Risk Management team is specialist in nature, which leads to the team having a large amount of senior and experienced team members. The specialist nature of our work can sometimes be seen as daunting for our graduates. However, you’ll learn pretty quickly that everyone is there to help you learn and develop your credit and market risk skills. While we have a number of formal and informal training sessions throughout the year for our junior staff, in your first year, you will work directly with our partners and directors, learning quickly on the job. While developing your technical skills, you’ll also have the opportunity to learn softer skills such as how to manage smaller projects and present to clients.

The two best parts of being in the Financial Risk Management team are the variety,and the people. The project nature of our work means that one week you can be assisting a large bank to validate a credit risk model, and the next week you’re assisting a mining company manage their exposure to global commodity prices. While the changing nature of our work keeps us engaged, it’s the personalities in our team that make us love being in the office.

• Financial Risk Management