Risk Awards 2025: The winners

UBS claims top derivatives prize, lifetime award for Don Wilson, JP Morgan wins rates and credit

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After a rat-a-tat of shocks that rocked financial markets in recent years – Covid, Archegos, Ukraine, Silicon Valley Bank – the year 2024 was, whisper it quietly, a touch boring.

Not that some banks were complaining. Indeed, many of this year’s Risk.net award-winners grabbed the opportunity to focus on projects and initiatives that could have a lasting effect on their businesses – and the derivatives markets.

One such project was the work UBS undertook to digest former rival Credit Suisse. Market expectations for the merger were modest, given the scandals and losses that had beset Credit Suisse’s investment bank prior to its failure. That changed after UBS executives took a detailed look under the hood of their recent purchase. For all its problems, Credit Suisse had undeniable strengths in business lines where UBS was lacking.

More than $60 billion of derivatives positions and roughly 400 staff migrated to UBS’s markets division as part of the acquisition. The integration was executed with clockwork efficiency, with 90% of the migrations completed within 18 months.    

The takeover enabled UBS to rebuild its fixed income solutions business, plug holes in equity derivatives, and re-engage with corporate clients in a way it hasn’t since its retreat from dealmaking over a decade ago. The transformation has been such that Jason Barron, head of global markets, describes the combined unit as “a new UBS”.

This new UBS scooped Risk.net’s top prize for derivatives house of the year and also landed the awards for currency derivatives and structured products house of the year.       

Reaping rewards

Meanwhile, at JP Morgan, a multi-year effort to cross-pollinate different parts of its credit business is bearing fruit. Investments in portfolio trading fostered growth in total return swaps, while enhancements to exchange-traded fund pricing generated more demand for ETF options, which in turn created more opportunities to trade options on credit default swap indexes. “We are reaping the reward of what we have sowed these last few years,” says Olivier Cajfinger, global head of investment grade credit sales, short-term fixed income, and public finance distribution.

This year, the bank began applying the same philosophy to so-called tranche products such as collateralised loan obligations and even synthetic risk transfers, which divide an underlying pool of loans into buckets of varying risk levels. The bank also found willing buyers for its collateralised synthetic obligations, which slice up portfolios of single-name credit default swaps.

By integrating the risk management of macro index and bespoke products, JP Morgan created more capacity to warehouse and recycle tranche risk, increasing its market share in the process.

JP Morgan wins credit derivatives house of the year, and also claimed the award for interest rate derivatives, having cemented its position as a flow hub in a year of macro uncertainty. It did so in part by embracing API trading, which now accounts for 10% of its entire flow. While some dealers have been reluctant to offer direct APIs for fear of being arbitraged by high-speed traders, JP Morgan has overcome these concerns.

“We consider ourselves a central pool of liquidity,” says Matthew Franklin-Lyons, global head of rates trading. “We have achieved escape velocity in such a way that routing all enquiry types into JP Morgan maximises liquidity for clients and our ability to risk transfer.”

Expand and thrive

This year also saw Bank of America – our equity derivatives house of the year – complete an ambitious multi-year project to build a third-party distribution platform for retail structured notes. The investment paid immediate dividends, with structured notes issuance quadrupling to more than $9 billion in the first three quarters of 2024, enough for a top five position in the US.

Elsewhere, a push by Natixis to build up its flow trading franchise, which began in 2021, reached a critical milestone this year, with client volumes in rates and currencies nearly doubling. Natixis wins the flow market-maker prize, while the award for bank risk manager goes to Intesa Sanpaolo, which completed a major ‘front-to-risk’ project that will allow the bank to use internal models to calculate capital requirements for its lucrative investment certificates business under incoming trading book rules.

Outside the banking sphere, BlackRock, this year’s investment house of the year, established separate teams in India to automate rudimentary processes and create a suite of risk models – part of a wider effort to achieve “algorithmic scale” in the rapidly evolving asset management landscape.

Eurex wins exchange of the year, primarily for its revamped credit futures contract, which broke through $10 billion in volume this year – more than 15 years after the German bourse first tried to get it off the ground.  

Trade wins

The recipient of this year’s lifetime achievement award is Don Wilson, founder of DRW Trading. Wilson is a singular figure in the derivatives markets, and his career and the firm he has built defy definition. One of the early masters of arbitrage in listed derivatives, he helped salvage the auction of Lehman Brothers’ futures and options trades after the bank’s collapse in 2008, and then found himself accused of manipulating the market for a short-lived interest rate contract. Wilson fought and won the case, preventing what many see as a dangerous precedent that would have made it harder to correct mispricings in the markets.

“If [regulators] could define market manipulation in that way, then they could sue anybody for any reason at any time,” Wilson tells Risk.net.

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As always, picking the winners was hard. All candidates had to submit detailed information on their businesses, as a precursor to lengthy, off-the-record interviews. Shortlisted candidates were then subject to a due diligence phase, in which the editorial team spoke to each firm’s clients and other market participants. The final decisions were made by Risk.net’s editors and journalists, weighing a number of factors, including risk management, creativity and innovation, liquidity provision, quality of service and customer satisfaction, and engagement with regulatory issues. Where decisions were tight, client feedback often helped settle the issue. The Risk.net editorial team thanks all this year’s participants for their time and help. The full list of winners, along with articles explaining our choices, can be found below.

The Winners

DERIVATIVES CATEGORIES

Derivatives house of the year: UBS

Interest rate derivatives house of the year: JP Morgan

Currency derivatives house of the year: UBS

Equity derivatives house of the year: Bank of America

Credit derivatives house of the year: JP Morgan

Inflation derivatives house of the year: Natixis

Structured products house of the year: UBS

Risk solutions house of the year: Santander CIB

Flow market-maker of the year: Natixis

INDIVIDUAL CATEGORIES

Rising star in quant finance: Milena Vuletić

Quant of the year: Julien Guyon

Lifetime achievement: Don Wilson

RISK MANAGEMENT CATEGORIES

Bank risk manager of the year: Intesa Sanpaolo

Credit portfolio manager of the year: UniCredit

Sovereign risk manager of the year: Côte d’Ivoire

INVESTING CATEGORIES

Investment house of the year: BlackRock

Hedge fund of the year: Citadel

MARKET STRUCTURE CATEGORIES

Exchange of the year: Eurex

Clearing house of the year: LCH

OTC trading platform of the year: BNP Paribas

SERVICE CATEGORIES

Derivatives client clearer of the year: Societe Generale

Law firm of the year: Linklaters

TECHNOLOGY CATEGORIES

Technology vendor of the year: Numerix