Not everyone has a photograph of their own office building on their office wall. But for Ashok Varadhan, co-head of global markets at Goldman Sachs, a print of the bank’s headquarters lighting up a dark Manhattan skyline as the city was battered by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 is a reminder of what good risk management looks like.
Years earlier, the bank had bought thousands of sandbags. And rather than bury its emergency generators in the basement, it put them on a higher floor. When the floods came, the preparation paid off: Goldman had power when many did not. As Varadhan likes to say: “Preventative care matters.”
Shortlisted
And so it proved in the period under review for Euromoney’s awards this year, which captured not only the dislocation of the pandemic but also a host of other traps set for the unwary.