MSCI EMEA Investment Risk Summit

Registration and networking breakfast

Opening Remarks

What Global Capital Reallocation Actually Means

The localization of supply chains, the divergence of emerging market risk profiles, and the accelerating shift of capital into private assets are interconnected forces reshaping how risk concentrates across institutional portfolios. The institutions navigating this most effectively are pairing the analytical rigor of factor-based risk models with complementary capabilities in regime monitoring, scenario analysis, and cross-asset transparency to see exposures that asset-class-level analysis alone can miss. This panel examines the underlying mechanics: where capital is being redirected, where new concentrations are forming, and what a total-portfolio view reveals about allocation decisions made in a different market environment.

The Intelligence Layer: Data, Methodology and What Scales

AI's capabilities are advancing exponentially, but institutional adoption is advancing incrementally. That gap is where value is being created and lost, and it is widening precisely because the most important questions are not about the technology. They are about the data the technology runs on, the methodology governing its outputs and the analytical foundation that makes AI-generated insight trustworthy enough to act on. This panel examines where AI is delivering value in investment and risk workflows and why that value depends entirely on the rigor of the underlying infrastructure. The rise of MCP as a connectivity standard, the governance requirements of cloud-based data architecture, and the question of what “investment-grade data” means in an era of LLMs are not technology questions. They are research questions, and answering them is what transforms AI from a speed advantage into an analytical one.

Networking Break

The Portfolio of the Future: Customization, Integration and the End of One-Size-Fits-All

The investment function is being rebuilt around customization. Custom benchmarks. Custom factor models. Custom risk overlays tailored to a specific liability profile or mandate. Platform-agnostic architecture lets institutions bring their own data, models, and workflows rather than conform to a vendor's infrastructure. This panel explores what the next generation of institutional investment infrastructure looks like: more localized in response to regulatory divergence, more personalized in response to client demand and more integrated across asset classes as the public-private boundary continues to blur. What does a truly total-portfolio institution look like, and what has to change about data, models and governance to get there?

Networking lunch

Moorgate Hub 1: The Transition Signal: Positioning Portfolios for Energy Transition Risk and Opportunity

The energy transition is increasingly a financial variable, not only a reporting obligation. Drawing on MSCI research covering more than 37,000 funds globally, this session examines the evidence linking transition characteristics to portfolio outcomes, with better-positioned funds associated with stronger returns in recent years. Speakers walk through the two dimensions that drive the picture, transition pressure and transition readiness, and the framework that maps funds as transition resilient, prepared, passive or exposed. The discussion turns that framework into practice: how senior investment and risk leaders can read transition signals in portfolio construction, manager selection and total portfolio risk, and where the most material risks and opportunities sit across sectors and regions.

Moorgate Hub 2: Rethinking Risk Through a Total Portfolio Lens

As more asset owners move towards a total portfolio approach, the traditional boundaries between asset classes are becoming less important than the contribution each investment makes to overall portfolio objectives. Rather than considering risk within individual asset-class allocations, institutions are increasingly asking how it should be understood and managed across the whole portfolio.

That shift creates new questions. How do different exposures interact as market conditions change? How should institutions think about liquidity and resilience at the portfolio level? And how can scenario analysis help investment teams understand whether the portfolio remains positioned to meet its long-term objectives and liabilities?

This session will set the scene for those questions, exploring what changes as institutions adopt a total portfolio approach and what that means for the way risk is measured, analyzed and managed.

Gracechurch Hub: Searching for Alpha: Custom Models, Signals and the Architecture of Differentiated Returns

Differentiation in systematic investing increasingly comes from architecture—how managers configure factor models, integrate signals, leverage new data sets, and manage capacity. In an era where AI is unlocking patterns in alternative and new data sources that were previously not usable, the fundamental questions have shifted: which data sources actually add signal; how does access to new data change your factor models; and what's the engineering effort to move from promising research to production? As demand for customization grows, practitioners face a different trade-off: when does the flexibility of a custom model justify the complexity and maintenance cost versus a standardized foundation you can adapt. Hear from managers and specialists on where the edge actually lives today. 

Moorgate Hub 1: From Geospatial Data to Investment Decisions: Quantifying Physical Climate Risk

Extreme weather is now cited in 23.8% of public-company profit warnings, while drought and low river flows in Europe show how localized hazards can disrupt transport, supply chains and production. Discover how MSCI and First Street combine portfolio analytics, geospatial intelligence and physics-based climate modelling to assess physical risk from the bottom up across multi-asset-class portfolios, mapping location-specific hazards to companies, real estate and critical infrastructure such as energy assets and data centers, sharpening the concentration limits and exposure screens risk and portfolio functions already run.

Look beyond the asset: Physical risk doesn’t stop at a company’s own locations. We’ll show how the same geographic lens can extend into the supply chain by mapping Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers to physical hazards, revealing exposures and concentrations of risk across the value chain that country-of-domicile assessments may miss.

Moorgate Hub 2: The Target Is Not the Benchmark

Private-market performance is often assessed against an absolute return target, a public market equivalent or a peer group. Each can provide useful information, but are they really benchmarks, and are they answering the questions asset owners need them to answer?

This session examines what robust performance measurement in private markets should look like, from the data and methodology underpinning a benchmark to the classifications needed to make meaningful comparisons across strategies. It will explore why a common language matters, how stronger measurement frameworks can support investment governance, and what asset owners should be asking of the measures they use to evaluate performance.

Drawing on new MSCI research, the session will challenge some established practices while considering how more consistent data, classification and measurement can give investors a clearer understanding of private-market performance.

Gracechurch Hub: The AI Maturity Framework: Where Adoption Stalls, and How to Address It

Interest in AI-enabled workflows is now widespread among investment and risk teams, but adoption lags well behind interest. This session examines where clients genuinely stall along that journey, from early concerns around data governance, sensitivity, and trust in model outputs, to the practical grind of consolidating data into a warehouse and exposing it through APIs, to the harder shift toward multi-agent workflows and protocols such as MCP once an organization is ready to build on governed data access. MSCI speakers take on client personas at different stages of this journey. An AI advisor supports by naming the stage-specific blockers, including licensing, infrastructure, cost, data sensitivity, and the practical next step that moves a client past it, drawn from patterns observed directly across client conversations.

Moorgate Hub 1: The Limits of History: Scenario Design for Risks Without a Precedent

Historical stress tests are increasingly insufficient for the risks that matter most today. Trade fragmentation, supply chain disruption, index concentration and the emerging risks that do not fit neatly into traditional models are reshaping what it means to stress-test a portfolio seriously. This session moves the conversation from backward-looking compliance frameworks to forward-looking scenario design that challenges portfolio construction assumptions and explores the next generation of risk thinking for a world that looks increasingly less like the historical data it was modeled on. Drawing on MSCI's macro-finance scenario framework and the 'When Regimes Shift' research, speakers will walk through live scenario construction and the practical implications for multi-asset portfolios.

Moorgate Hub 2: Bringing Private Markets Into the Total Portfolio View

As private market allocations become an increasingly important part of institutional portfolios, asset owners face a broader challenge than simply understanding how individual investments are performing. They need to understand how private assets contribute to portfolio-wide performance, risk, exposures and resilience — and how those insights should influence investment decisions.

This discussion explores what changes when public and private assets are considered together through a total-portfolio lens. How can institutions build a more comparable view of performance and risk across asset classes? What role can private market benchmarks and indices play in putting performance into context? And how can integrated data and analytics help investment teams understand portfolio exposures, test scenarios and make better allocation decisions?

The conversation will also consider the practical questions that emerge as institutions transition toward a total-portfolio model: how to think about risk and resilience across public and private assets, how attribution can inform decisions, and where greater transparency can improve both investment oversight and governance.

The aim is not to prescribe a single portfolio model, but to explore how institutions can make better decisions when private markets are treated as part of the total portfolio rather than as a separate investment universe.

Gracechurch Hub: Beyond Duration and Spread: Systematic Factors in Fixed Income

For two decades, factor investing has shaped how equity portfolios are built, analyzed, and managed. In the past, factor investing in fixed income has remained a niche play constrained by instrument complexity, large bid-offer spread, and liquidity concerns. These constraints are easing as fixed income pricing becomes more transparent with improving liquidity.

This session examines what changes when the factor investing framework is applied to bonds: which factors hold up, which require rebuilding, and whether signals can move between the two asset classes. The discussion is intended for portfolio managers and risk leaders considering the implications for portfolio, index, and risk-model construction.