Jane McCarthy, manager of portfolio risk management BHP Billiton

Jane McCarthy is manager of portfolio risk management at BHP Billiton. She is responsible for quantitative portfolio modelling and risk analysis, including regular reporting to the board and financial risk management committee

What do you regard as the most significant recent developments in risk management?

Proper options evaluation, going beyond simple Black-Scholes to incorporate non-normal underlying distributions and multiple underlying risk factors. Say you have a mine producing copper, silver and gold, for example - traditional Black-Scholes would not allow you to model all three risk factors. You would need to use Monte Carlo software to evaluate such options accurately.

The integration of this with decision