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Financial Innovation Prize 2010

The Swiss CFA Society is once again looking for entries for its Financial Innovation Prize which will award a cash award of CHF 5'000 to reward contributions fostering practical innovation in finance.

We are happy to announce that two of last year's three judges are back this year to ensure some consistency in our process. And we are fortunate to have Panagiotis Spiliopoulos as our new panel member this year; Panagiotis has been the Head of research for Bank Vontobel for the past two years.

We are looking for contributions with practical applicability, or an innovative financial product, process or approach. Candidates must be professionally active in Switzerland. Preference will be given to candidates at the beginning of their careers. It is recommended that the submission should be no more than 3000 to 4000 words with no single required format. The document should however be self-contained, but possibly accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation/summary of up to ten pages. All entries will be subjected to plagiarism testing.

Selection process:

The winner will be selected by the award committee convened by SCFAS.
The members of the committee are:

Professor Michael Rockinger, Swiss Finance Institute and University of Lausanne

Dr. Renato Staub, Investments, Risk Capital Allocation Singer Partners

Mr. Panagiotis Spiliopoulos, Head of Research Bank Vontobel

Please submit your application before the end of August to fip@scfas.org.

Kindest Regards,

Midge Brown, CFA
Patrick Ranzijn, CFA
SCFAS

Financial Innovation Prize 2009

The Swiss CFA Society in 2009 awarded its First Financial Innovation Prize comprising of a cash award of CHF 5'000 to reward contributions fostering practical innovation in finance.

The contribution were submitted in the form of a research paper with practical applicability, or an innovative financial product, process or approach. Candidates must be professionally active in Switzerland. Preference was given to candidates at the beginning of their career.

Selection process:

The winner was selected by the award committee convened by SCFAS. The members of the committee were:

Christian W. Hafner, Managing Partner, Wegelin & Co. Private Bankers

Professor Michael Rockinger, Swiss Finance Institute and University of Lausanne

Dr. Renato Staub, Senior Asset Allocation and Risk Analyst, UBS Global Asset Management

Winners:

The panel of judges of the SCFAS 2009 Financial Innovation Prize have decided to award the prize to Philipp Isenegger and Rico von Wyss for their paper 'The Valuation of Derivatives on Carbon Emission Certificates - a GARCH Approach'.

It was felt that the paper constitutes an important step in combining finance and environmental issues, and, in so doing, addressing a problem that is of huge importance in our contemporary world. The paper involved a considerable amount of work, and is one of the first on the pricing of futures on CO2 emissions in Europe. The authors used empirical evidence to extend the existing literature, and the paper will be of practical use in developing pricing models - it will be directly applicable in producing software for traders in the emissions market. This paper closes a scientific research gap and constitutes research at any advanced stage.