Andrea Graves
Advisory | Governance | Oversight
LinkedIn Profile
Translating technical complexity into conceptual clarity, and ensuring institutional stability by safeguarding balance sheet resilience under all market conditions.
Strategic Oversight • Quantitative Resilience • Effective Governance
A career defined by a commitment to institutional integrity through quantitative rigor. Having co-headed Market & Liquidity Risk at the Bank of England, I specialize in ensuring balance sheets possess sufficient liquidity to meet obligations under all market conditions.
1. Quantitative Oversight: Leveraging an MSc in Financial Engineering to provide constructive challenge to internal models. Ensuring capital is sufficiently robust and aligned with risk appetite.
2. Strategic Resilience: Drawing on over a decade at the Bank of England, advising leadership through the complexities of designing, developping and implementing new facilities, navigating with clarity their balance sheet demands.
3.Technical Advisory: Bridging the gap between technical 'black boxes' and fiduciary oversight by translating sophisticated valuation and risk methodologies into clear, strategic insights for effective Board-level governance.
Bank of England (~12 Years)
Global Institutional Experience (~12 Years combined)
Senior Leadership
The Problem: During the 2024 "Mini-Budget" also known as the UK's LDI crisis, Gilt yields spiked 200bps, threatening the solvency of leveraged NBFIs and broader financial stability.
The Action: Designed the risk methodology for an emergency Gilt repo facility to be deployed to Non-Bank Financial Institutions (Insurers and Pensions) in times of market disfunction.
The Result: The framework’s operational transparency drove a substantial improvement in market sentiment and an immediate decrease in implied volatility.
The Problem: Optimizing the risk-return profile of the UK's Foreign Reserves within strict liquidity constraints to ensure readiness for market intervention.
The Action: Advised His Majesty's Treasury (HMT) on the optimal risk-return investment framework, utilizing quantitative modeling to balance yield with high-grade asset liquidity.
The Result: Established a robust investment mandate that ensured maximum capital preservation while maintaining requisite liquidity buffers for policy needs.
The Problem: Systemic vulnerability due to insufficient or inadequate risk capture in capital models, requiring firms to transition away bail-out reliance in favour of proactive prevention increasing own resilience under extreme tail-risk scenarios.
The Action: Led supervisory assessments of advanced risk models for Tier-1 institutions (Citi, BAML, HSBC, RBS, Goldman Sachs, Standard Bank, JPM, and Lloyds). Directly challenged C-suite executives on Board-level decisions regarding model governance. Identified significant methodology limitations to ensure design, development, and implementation of models were mathematically robust and recovery playbooks met regulatory requirements/standards.
The Result: Enhanced the safety and soundness of the UK financial sector by ensuring major firms remained operational during extreme stress, protecting the economy from contagion.