Data tells us endless stories, you just have to know how to interpret it. This is the motto that characterizes Maurizio Gallina, Risk Manager of Mediolanum Gestione Fondi SGR, as well as director of the Monza and Brianza Chapter of Startup Grind, one of the largest startup communities in the world.

Gallina has an unbridled passion for data and emerging technologies (from Artificial Intelligence techniques to Blockchain). In the Risk Management office of Fund Management for about fifteen years, with previous roles and assignments, from the securities office as a broker to mutual fund analysis, "experiences that were preparatory to me to become the Risk Manager I am today," he tells how his passion for data is now at the core of his professional Risk Management practice.

A dutiful question, to break the ice, naturally concerns data. What is your "relationship" with data? What would you like it to reveal to us in terms of knowledge?

Starting from my own field, I often recall that the branch of the study of Financial Intelligence has been relying for years on the fact that the distribution of returns within the stock exchange universe was "normal" [in the mathematical sense of the term: in probability theory, the normal distribution-or Gauss distribution named after the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss-is a continuous probability distribution that is often used as a first approximation to describe real-valued random variables that tend to concentrate around a single mean value- ndr.].

It is important to understand the patterns, that is, how one uses the data at hand: there is no point in creating a dataset to find at all costs an answer that I have already preconfigured at the outset. Data is not for confirmation but for new knowledge.

Building on this awareness about the proper usage of data, what does it mean to do Risk Management in a financial reality today?

I will say something trite but doing risk management today means "always being on the ball." In a world that changes very fast and very quickly, it is crucial to adapt to those changes with extreme flexibility. Today, the changes come from many fronts and are of a varied nature: they can come from regulations, from the introduction of new financial products, but also from the rise of new phenomena and trends, from Spacs (special purpose acquisition companies, companies and legal entities that present themselves as "empty boxes"-because they do not produce anything and do not offer any services-whose mission is to acquire other companies for listing on the stock exchange and growth in capitalization), to cryptocurrencies.

These are changes that are going to affect forecasting models, analyses, risk assessments... in short, you have to understand what is going on in the world.

What has been the biggest challenge you have faced in the working environment?

Perhaps the biggest challenge has been related to the need to interface with the outside world, the world outside the specific scope of risk management, such as with IT flows. A challenge that never ends because, of course, risk management is anything but static.

Another challenge, related more generally to the risk manager position, concerns the approach to data and its usage. In my opinion, a risk manager must have "data sensitivity," must immediately understand not so much the orders of magnitude as the granularity of the information that the data can offer. You have to establish a good feeling for data.

In your opinion, what are the areas of technological innovation that could "change the world"?

I want to mention three. The first is the blockchain, but it will only become disruptive when it manages to combine its intelligent, better to say valuable, application with interfaces within everyone's reach.

The second is the decentralization and resource sharing for parallel computing. We are still far from such a scenario, but I like to look far ahead, and this would be a really good innovation/revolution because it would allow everyone to pool resources, even application services, to solve complex problems.

The third relates to the current focus of Space exploration that aims, for example, at finding new materials to be extracted from other Planets. One innovation that triggers many others: sending mining machinery and systems, as well as skilled personnel, to other Planets could lead us to a new idea of space exploration, even to the colonization of other Planets.