Our story
The CountryRisk.io story began in December 2015. Driven by a desire to simplify country risk assessments and establish a groundbreaking, crowdsourced ratings and intelligence platform, founders Jenny and Bernhard decided to turn their passion project into a pioneering business.
Our values
Transparency: When it comes to the methodologies behind its models and processes, CountryRisk.io is an open book. It allows you to see exactly how you arrived at your final rating. There is no committee who would, or could, potentially override your results.
Structured framework: We believe that a structured framework combining quantitative and qualitative factors is the best way to analyse sovereign and country risk. Qualitative factors add insights from practical experience, which can capture risk factors that quantitative data or statistical models cannot.
Constructive exchange: One perspective is interesting. But multiple perspectives are what tend to reveal the truth. That’s why we believe that a constructive exchange of multiple informed perspectives makes for superior country risk analyses.
Independence: CountryRisk.io is independent of any rating issuer or commercial credit rating agency. This means we are free of any conflict of interest from issuers or any institutions, and this preserves the integrity of our models and rating processes.
Jennifer Asuncion-Banziger - Co-founder
Jennifer has 20 years of country risk experience that includes working for the Asian Development Bank, secondments to the Department of Finance of the Philippines and other ASEAN central banks and ministries of finance and various private sector financial institutions.
Jennifer was educated in the US (Hofstra University) and UK (London School of Economics).
Bernhard Obenhuber - Co-founder
Bernhard brings 10 years of experience in investment strategy and research for the largest Swiss banks with a strong focus on emerging market fixed income and quantitative modelling.
Bernhard holds master degrees in economics and finance from the University of Innsbruck and is a CFA charterholder.
Axel Swoboda - CDO
Patrick Kranzlmüller - CTO
More than 15 years of experience in the backend development of web applications.
Patrick has a master in media and communication sciences from the University of Vienna, Austria.
Passionate about building stable, future-proof backend solutions and APIs based on clean, maintainable code.
Builder and co-founder of bookamat.com and zoa-gdpr.com
Our mission is simple.
We believe that sovereign ratings should be a public good, so we created CountryRisk.io to make that vision a reality--underpinned by our core values.
An alternative to the credit rating agencies
At the height of the European debt crisis, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) published its Principles for Reducing Reliance on CRA Ratings. These Principles called for reducing mechanistic reliance on, and greater independence from, the Big Three credit rating agencies.
Our belief in this laudable goal was the spark that kindled our big idea: what if we combined the knowledge of sovereign risk analysts around the world to create a standard model that everyone could use, thereby creating a credible alternative to the Big Three?
Advisory Board
Hugo Banziger
Hugo Banziger serves on the board of the International Committee of the Red Cross and chairs its audit committee.
Between 2014 and 2018, he was a Managing Partner at Lombard Odier, a Geneva-based private bank. At the same time, Hugo served as Chairman of the EUREX Group, Europe’s largest exchange for traded options and financial futures.
He also chaired the Advisory Panel to the Committee of European Banking Supervisors from 2007 to 2010, co-chaired the Enhanced Disclosure Task Force of the Financial Stability Board, and was a member of the EU High-Level Expert Group on reforming the structure of the EU banking sector (Liikanen Group).
Between 2006 and 2012, Hugo was a member of Deutsche Bank’s Management Board, where he was Chief Risk Officer responsible for capital, liquidity, legal, compliance and security.
Hugo holds a PhD in Economic History from the University of Bern. He served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Swiss Armed Forces and has taught at the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics and the Lee Kwan Yew Institute for Public Policy in Singapore.
Alexandra Engel
Alexandra Engel brings 15 years of international professional experience in banking and asset management to CountryRisk.io.
She has headed the Legal & Corporate Secretary Division at Hauck Aufhäuser Lampe since January 2022, and previously held this role with its legal predecessor Bankhaus Lampe.
In the two years prior, Alexandra headed the Policy Centre at the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE at Goethe University Frankfurt. There, she established networks with regulators and politicians in Germany and Brussels, and developed the Centre’s strategic objectives and processes.
Before joining SAFE, Alexandra spent nearly eight years at Deutsche Bank as Senior Legal Counsel. Aside from her expertise in EU banking regulation, she was primary legal advisor for the global implementation of the US Volcker Rule and influenced the discussion around the application of the rule in the US market, particularly in terms of its interplay with non-US law.
Alexandra entered the banking industry as Legal Counsel at Dresdner Kleinwort in Frankfurt. She received her doctorate in Law from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2005.
Moritz Kraemer
Moritz is Chief Economist of Germany's Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW).
He held the same role for CountryRisk.io in 2021, and as Advisor, will continue to play an integral role in reinforcing the robustness of CountryRisk.io's sovereign risk models as well as engaging in the company’s strategic direction.
Moritz is very well known and respected for the thought leadership and the senior roles he held with S&P Global Ratings, which he joined in 2001. Before leaving S&P at the end of 2018, he was Global Chief Rating Officer, Sovereigns. He has interacted with senior investors and policymakers across the globe in over 100 countries. He has lived and worked in four continents and brings a broad international experience to CountryRisk.io.
Moritz is a frequent influential commentator on matters pertaining to country risk in Tier-1 print and TV-media as well as via prestigious think tanks. He teaches sovereign risk at Goethe-University Frankfurt and Humboldt University Berlin.
Moritz has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Göttingen. He was educated in Economics, Latin American Studies and Literature in Frankfurt, Southampton and San Diego.