Team

Paul has particular in-depth subject matter expertise in implementing risk management, including both trading risk management as well as wider enterprise risks. His experience includes risk policy development and improvement of the risk governance and control framework, risk modelling and the calculation of risk metrics, and the implementation of the core ETRM system and wider risk system infrastructure. He has led numerous diagnostic reviews to benchmark risk management practices against industry best practice. As a consultant, Paul has:

• Advised Bord Gais Energy on a new trading book structure to improve P&L reporting and performance measurement;
• Reviewed the trading and risk management practices of OVO Energy, and supported the firm to implement the recommendations resulting from the assessment; and
• Supported Beijing-based CNOOC Gas and Power to establish a Risk Management function, including a risk policy, trading risk limits, a hedging strategy, and ETRM system functional requirements.

Paul joined ESP Consulting from Nuon (now Vattenfall), where he held numerous risk management roles including Manager of Quantitative Risk Analysis and Middle Office Manager.

Paul has supported organisations in developing their responses to regulatory change, market evolution, corporate action (such as mergers), and business growth. In particular, his recent projects have focused on business process optimisation and redesign of the organisation. Paul has designed transfer pricing arrangements to facilitate performance measurement and thus improve accountability across the organisation. Paul has also fulfilled interim management assignments. For example, Paul has:

• Supported Bord Gais Energy in designing new business processes for short term power trading in preparation for a new wholesale power market model in Ireland;
• Acted as the interim Managing Director/CEO for the Nigerian national electrical grid, where he directed the design and implementation of the “ring-fencing” project to establish separate Operations and Engineering companies under a thin holding company;
• Supported ESB, Ireland’s largest electrical utility, in the overall development of a transfer pricing policy and a business process to transfer risk exposures from the generation and customer divisions to trading where these exposures could be hedged and managed; and
• As a contractor for Vattenfall, supported a large change programme to fully integrate two trading organisations (people and systems) into a single tradefloor following Vattenfall’s acquisition of Nuon.

Paul has extensive modelling experience. In addition to risk exposure modelling for commodity portfolios considering both market risk (e.g. value at risk, earnings at risk) and credit risk (e.g. potential future exposure, expected credit loss), Paul’s modelling skills include asset dispatch optimisation and market price modelling from both a stochastic and fundamental approach. Paul takes a pragmatic approach to model building, implementing easily calibrated prototypes which capture the essential features of the system being modelled. Since joining ESP Consulting, Paul has:

• Supported Bord Gais Energy to prepare for short-term electricity operations by advising on wind and demand forecasting as well as the strategy to optimise their CCGT asset in the day-ahead and balancing market;
• Delivered a training course at Centrica to their quantitative teams on applying Monte Carlo simulation and tree-based approaches to the optimisation of natural gas storage and CCGT asset dispatch; and
• Supported EDF Energy in their response to the Competition and Market Authority’s review of the GB energy market by quantifying the reduced volatility of cashflows and gross margin that can be a beneficial consequence of vertical integration.

Paul has two university degrees in mathematics. He began his career in the energy market at Financial Engineering Associates, a specialist provider of software models to energy companies. He was subsequently appointed to be Manager of Quantitative Risk Analysis at Nuon Energy in Amsterdam.