 Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome everyone who joined us today. First, let me welcome our four members and participants for Davos Agenda Week to this discussion, but also everyone streaming online at www.weform.org around the world. Thank you for joining us today. Today's panel discussion will be taking place in two parts. We will be beginning with a 30-minute public panel discussion, which will be followed by a 30-minute private dialogue attended by our four members. This 30-minute public panel, which we will begin shortly, will be recorded and will be available on our website shortly after the conclusion of this discussion. The context of why we are here today is one in which the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that we face a series of risks that are increasing in frequency and severity, building greater resiliency to these risks, whether relating to pandemics, climate change, cyber attacks, or other risks has become more important than ever to build a more resilient and sustainable and prosperous future. Today's discussion, Reassessing Corporate Risk and Reinforcing Resilience in the Post-COVID World, will focus on how stakeholders can deliver against this imperative, and in particular how the private sector has a critical role to play. This discussion builds on several initiatives that we are undertaking here at the forum to explore some of the solutions and the partnerships and the efforts that can build greater resilience in the world today. You may have seen last week the forum released our annual Global Risk Report, which talked about societal fractures, environmental degradation, and geopolitical fragmentation to some of the risks that we'll be facing over the next year. Our COVID-19 Financial Services Response Network and our Insurance and Asset Management Industry Action Group are two groups as well that have looked at specifically the vital role the private sector can play in building this resiliency agenda. Publishing last September a document and a call to action on how we build a more resilient and sustainable world with an action plan for those industries, which you can find on our website. And finally, our Transformational Investment Initiative in partnership with our institutional investor community, which is looking at collectively how investors can champion long-term thinking to constructively tackle complicated problems while pursuing attractive risk-adjusted investment returns. This is a vital yet complicated topic, and for this reason we're thrilled to have a panel today with various unique perspectives that will come to this discussion. And we're extremely happy as well to have Litvi Siddiqui joining us today to moderate the session. Litvi is a young global leader of the World Economic Forum. He is a managing director at the CFA Institute and is also a visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Litvi, thank you for joining us today from Singapore. I will turn it over to you now for a great discussion. Thank you. Thank you, Andre, and hello. Good morning and good afternoon everyone from here in Singapore. Today's discussion is about reinforcing resilience, not just the management of known risks, but also preparedness for and recovery from unknown risks. Specifically, our exam question today is whether private corporations and investment capital can play a leadership role in building systemic resiliency. Is it possible to get out of a hyper-efficiency mindset, a short-term mindset, and carry some redundancies along in the system that may have previously been seen to be wasteful? At a time of geopolitical distancing, an apparently reduced state-level cooperation compared to, say, the aftermath of the global financial crisis, is there a role for private sector cooperation to step into the breach? Can private sector decisions, especially investment decisions, be more intentional towards environmental and social outcomes? Are there opportunities as we emerge from this tragic global pandemic to accelerate the march towards sustainable development goals, stakeholder capitalism, which was the theme of Damos last year? Is there a case to be made that inclusion is a strategic imperative for businesses, especially when viewed through the lens of risk resilience? The World Economic Forum's most recent annual risk report uses the word inequality and variations of that 15 times in just the executive summary. Invalence, fragmentation, fractures, uneven, disproportionate, variance of the same thing. And taking stock of the year that has been and reflecting on the risk perception survey, the latest survey, it points to at least three things. Number one, the need to take a holistic, systems-wide view of risk impact. So focus not just on this risk factor or that risk factor, but multiple risk factors that interact and can amplify exponentially through feedback loops. Secondly, the need to improve risk communications. It's hard enough communicating statistics and probabilities in the best of times without having to contend with misinformation during a crisis. And thirdly, the need for new novel forms of partnership, public-private partnerships, on risk preparedness. On that backdrop, I am delighted to introduce our distinguished panel. I will invite each one of them to make some opening remarks in response to the exam question that I outlined above. I will introduce them just before it's their turn to speak. So let me start with Ms. Anne Richards. Anne Richards CVE is the Chief Executive Officer of Fidelity International, previously Chief Executive of M&G Investments and Chair of the Financial Contact Authority, FCA's practitioner panel. Amongst many other accolades, she is also an honorary fellow of CFA UK. Ms. Richards, welcome and your opening remarks please. Lovely, thank you very much and good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are in the world to everybody who's watching. It's been a fascinating 12 months. It's been many things over the last 12 months, but one of the things that I think well wrestled both as investors and actually as managers of business is how do you get to the heart of what it means to be running a resilient business? And I think for us there's a triumvirate of things which we link very closely together as we're thinking about what it means for corporates to try and navigate some of the things that have been thrown into such sharp relief over the last 12 months. And the triumvirate is a combination of survivability of sustainability and of resilience. And what I mean by that is it's clear as a business, you won't, you cannot survive unless you are both resilient and have a sustainable business model. So we link very closely the thoughts around resilience to thoughts around sustainability and why they're both such important facets of building a business that really can last, can be sustained in a very long term. So that's the sort of the context setting for this. Now, as an investor, when you look at the world and through this lens, you never meet a management team on the other side of the table who tells you they're not resilient. That's never an opening statement, we're not resilient. But somehow or other, I think we as investors have to find a way of getting to the bottom of where just in time means that just in case management has been forgotten. And that's what we are trying to build into our own sustainability framework. And we frame this through thinking around, first of all, how you should respond to external threats versus how you should respond to internal threats. Because they require somewhat different approaches in terms of your management techniques to thinking about how you build financial resilience, people resilience, and a whole bunch of other sorts of resiliency within them. It comes down to the difference between the preparedness that you need on the one hand to be prepared for external shocks and the prevention that you need in order to prepare for internal shocks. So it's a combination prevention and preparedness. But in both cases, the final element is contingency. And I think it's the contingency element that is too easy for management to forget about. It's the inch-wide mile deep or 2.54 centimeters wide and 1.6 kilometers deep threat, that it's too easy for management to think they are stepping over. But actually, when the cracks happen, you really slip right down them. So our premise is, just in conclusion, that thinking about resilience within that framework of sustainability and thinking about it in a way which then provides really measurable outcomes, which we investors could start to rate, will ultimately lead to higher ratings for companies over time. And that's really the goal that we are trying to get to. And we will try and build that proof statement over time. But that is our contention and trying to get that balance right between what is excessive redundancy versus what is appropriate redundancy in the supply chain, in the management and operational structures. That's the heart of what we're trying to get at. I'll stop there. A lot of feedback to you. Thank you, Ms. Richards. I'll come back to you with a follow-on question, probably around how do you do that balance between the cost of carrying redundancies in a competitive environment where others might be cutting costs? I'll come back to you about the moment. Now on to Mr. Kirill Dimitrov. Mr. Dimitrov is the Chief Executive Officer of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, one of the world's prominent sovereign wealth funds, $10 billion of assets under management. He has previously headed several large private equity funds, having started his career at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Mr. Dimitrov and I, we shared a panel on geo-economics competition six years ago in Davos. Some of the trends of divergent international cooperation that we spoke about then, unfortunately, seem to have diverged even more. So over to you, sir, your opening remarks. Thank you so much. It's really a great pleasure to be here. And I think we are one of the key panel in Davos because the topic of resilience is definitely a topic that is at the core of our last 12 months. It's at the core of what is to come. So it's a pleasure to be here. When I read Nassim Talib's book Black Swans, I really paid attention to it, but I didn't anticipate that we'll have a flock of Black Swans coming. Or you can use even the term swarm of Black Swans that has been swarming around the world in the last 12 months. And we expect more Black Swans swarms to come. And I think it is related to this really point of singularity is that we go through not only in terms of technological singularity, but also in terms of singularity on divisive changes, on really politics and divisiveness creating barriers for international cooperation, and even on some brain changes that are driven by technologies. So we have lots of singularities happening at the same time. And we believe that they accelerate those Black Swans events. And I think how we are prepared for them is a key topic. And rather than being theoretical, I'd like to briefly share seven very brief points on our experience of Russia's direct investment fund in dealing with pandemics, because it believes it's useful for how similar issues can be approached going forward. So first of all, we really focused on rule number one, which is understanding the problem, the resilience problem we face early. And in early January, we understood that COVID is very significant. And we really focused on this point number two, we really focused on where we can make the biggest difference. And we understood that we would finance tests, a drug, and a vaccine as basically three core elements of our contribution to fighting COVID. Point number three, we really picked partnerships. And we understood that only through partnerships we can overcome, including global partnerships. We had bi-weekly calls with other sovereign wealth funds, we stopped pharma companies, stopped pharma producers to really identify what is the best testing technology, what is the best anti-COVID drug to back, what is the best vaccine out there. And we believe we succeeded because our tests have been really important because it's very fast and the same precision as PCR. We have developed one of the two antiviral COVID drugs in the world and now Sputnik V vaccine has been covered a lot in media in many aspects of the vaccine. Point number four is serving society. I think once you really have all those crises, it's very important that your business, private business, public business, is serving society. And I think serving society is sort of the theme going forward because point number five, there is lots of misunderstanding, media attacks, that for example, Sputnik defaced, et cetera, and being resilient to those media attacks, building direct communication, building basically strategy in the world that has attention spent close to zero with new cycles changing and people not being able to go into the core of things and really focus on the basic things. It's very important. And the last two points, point number six for seeing next words. So what are the next ones that can come? And we believe it's about inflation. I think inflation is about to come in a messy way following all of the printing of money around the world. Obviously, not the pandemic is a possibility. And what we've done to work on this one will be important. We are talking about major environmental issues. Of course, terrorism or risk has been sort of forgotten a little bit, but it's still a major threat. So I think we need to have this global resilience. And again, I'll emphasize that we believe that division and political biases are the biggest roadblock for global resilience, for global cooperation, is they need to be overcome so specific work of different countries on issues that bring us together. And my point number seven of resilience and the final point is meditation. I think if we all meditate well, if we all come down a little bit, if we all focus that we are humans and we need to work together, it will help us overcome the roadblocks to resilience that we face. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Chair, Mr. Dimitri, the role that we can all play from our respective positions on yours clearly from the position of finance and capital. I will come back to you with a follow-up question on that. Allow me to now go to Mr. David Craig. Mr. Craig is the CEO of Refinitiv, previously president of Thomson Reuters Financial and Risk Business. Prior to that, he founded the Governance Risk and Compliance Business, GRC, at Thomson Reuters. He's a board member of the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C., and he is trained as a pilot with the Royal Air Force. Mr. Craig, your opening remarks, please. Thank you, Latvian, and good morning. I'd start just with a couple of points. One is that we're more fragile than we thought. We're probably more complacent than we ought to be, and we're certainly more connected than we've ever been. It's hardly surprising. The last 50 years have been a little bit strange in that there hadn't been really a major social, political... There's been no major wars. There's been... The last solar flare was in 1859, and that took out the telegram system at the time. I'll come on to that later. The last global pandemic was in 1918. The last major volcanic eruption was Prakatoa that clouds in the sky for several years. I think this pandemic, if there's a positive, it's going to challenge our thinking because that complacency is compounded by the additional risk of being far more connected with our digital networks, our employee networks, and frankly, in a world where governments are less prepared and less connected as well to deal with that. I think the other thing that we learned from this crisis in particular, particularly having sat through years of risk meetings where people poured over... I would say fairly micro risk, but I don't think any board member ever asked me, what would you do in a pandemic? You can't plan for everything, so you need to plan for anything. As well as the points that Anne was making about the sustainable business model, which I think are really important, is your business model prepared to disruption that you can't expect? I think what we've learned in life is we always prepare for the last crisis, but never the next one. Hurricane Sandy on the east coast of the US and New York. I learned through that that whilst everyone had planned resiliency, a few of our clients had put data centers that were 10 miles within each other and the size of the storms these days means that doesn't work. We all remember the terrible events of 9-11 and the problem with data resiliency of cables running through the same part of Manhattan to do that. My concern with this response is that the digital companies, like ourselves, frankly, are all saying, well, we've actually successfully managed this, being very, very digital, and the less digital companies haven't. But what happens if there's a major solar flare or an issue or a magnetic bomb that takes out technology? Some of the things I reflect on, too, that the panelists said, that you cannot be too lean in operations and you cannot be too short-term. By operations, I mean both the most important asset that you have, which is our people, and how do you make sure you've got resilience, redundancy, overlapping in centers and people. Also, how do you make sure your supply chain has resilience and is not too concentrated? I think some of the work we're actually doing with the World Economic Forum now on technology risk is looking at the dangers of concentration in technology, particularly as software viruses can spread even faster than human viruses. How do we make sure even unintended accidental or deliberate viruses don't take that course? The last point I'll make, obviously, being a world leader, and data is talking about the data. Whilst there are chances to look ahead of a crisis and try and predict what might happen, in fact, hedge funds were looking at sentiment data this time last year to really try and understand the extreme size of the outbreak. In the crisis, data can be incredibly important. There's a big difference between countries and governments that have been good at managing data and how they've responded to the crisis and countries and companies that have not. So actually being quick and adapt to get the right data to understand the extent of a crisis, how to respond. But also, to your point about private sector versus governments and how they can work together, I think data sharing mechanisms are incredibly important. China shared the COVID-19 genome sequence and over the weekend people were mapping it in Oxford and other places around the world where the vaccine was being developed. So I think there's some very, very important learning too about the sharing and accessibility of data. At a time when there are more data protection and resilience rules going in place, sometimes for localization and protection of people's individuals, sometimes for state interests. But I think we've got to be very, very careful about allowing those to stop the sharing of the right data at the right time that can help us respond to these crises. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Craig. You make a great point about our habit of focusing on the risk radar of what's visible versus what's coming from the outside. And this, the concept of Nassim Talib's black swan, but there's also Michelle Walker's gray rhino. So risks that are very much present. You can see the rhino over there, but there seems to be hesitation to act upon it until the rhino charges at which point is probably too late. My question to you when I come back would be around, you mentioned that we're more connected which makes risks spread a lot more easily. How do we prevent this possible backlash of reducing connectivity in the name of affirming resilience? So I'll come back to you on that one. If I can go up to Ms. Anne Richards, please. I have two questions for you. I'll ask the first one very quickly, which is you mentioned contingency, but contingency is optionality. And optionality has a cost of carry and you're spending money on something that you will not need. How do you justify that? So look, I think there's two ways of looking at that. The first is partly it's about the shape of the risk profile that you're willing to look at. Do you clip the coupon and take the short-term benefit of not managing the redundancy for the risk of the big hit at the end? Or actually, do you prefer a smoother profile? And there is a business choice within that, within degrees. But I'm not sure that the overall profile necessarily comes out with a better or worse outcome when you average all of that out. And I would argue that the smoother profile is probably more valuable over time. So I think that's one way of looking at it. The other thing is I think you can get very smart about how you build redundancy, dual redundancy into your model. And the more that you can identify where the single points of failure are and build in pipes that allow you to switch between, so the pipes are used but you have enough additional capacity that you can switch in between. The more you build that smart redundancy in, actually the additional cost of it in many parts of your operational structure are probably less than you think. So it's about smart redundancy, dual redundancy and failover. It's not about a wholesale additional cost. And there is a balance to it and accept that. But I think it is possible to do much more than many companies have historically done. Smart redundancy to go with smart agility that makes a lot of sense to me. Very quickly, the other question I wanted to ask you is around ESG and responsible investing in that whole area. It's very hard to see that so much progress has been made over there. But how do we energize and power, harness the passion here, while at the same time avoid this space getting contaminated, if you like, by tokenism or window dressing or impact washing, that sort of stuff? Oh gosh, well there's a lot of fear of impact washing or green washing going on. And I think it's fair to say that we are on a journey. But the vast majority of people that I interact with and come across are very passionate, even people who would not necessarily have been in that camp three, four, five years ago, about understanding that this is a direction of travel that we're going in. And so, you know, I think the coming together of all the different taxonomies, the sort of convergence into commonly accepted standards which can then be properly measured against is the way that we will cut through all of this. But I think the direction of travel is right. So, you know, I worry less about that than about the overarching sense that we are moving forward. Thank you. Mr. Dimitri, if I can come back to you now. You mentioned cooperation and he gave us examples of communication collaboration with other sovereign wealth funds and so on. I see this, you know, many investors taking a systems lead to investment, catalyzing investment in areas crowding in private capital where private capital may not have gone without the nudge and the initiative from sovereign wealth funds. In your experience, how do you overcome the possible suspicion, the geopolitical suspicion, the perception that sovereign money comes with geopolitical strings attached? Does that get in the way and is there a way to overcome that? Well, I think in particular with Russia, you know, we work a lot on dispelling really lots of misunderstandings on this. But, you know, what we've done, for example, you know, Ausputnik V vaccine is now registered in 14 countries. We'll have more than 25 registered within the next couple of weeks. And we really worked with each individual country. We have lots of private partners in different nations who will also be producing the vaccine. We co-invest with them together. And I think it really helps us that we have a network of sovereign wealth funds in 20 nations who worked with us successfully, who understands that we do not have political biases, who understands that we're a good partner. And this work of sovereign wealth partners in 20 countries creates for us a very good foundation to work with private businesses in those nations who otherwise would not really know how Russian direct investment fund operates. So I think this partnership approach is very important. And also, I think, you know, David mentioned something very important about supply chain, you know, issues and other issues. I think, you know, lots of private businesses need and can work with sovereign wealth funds to really, you know, get lots of financial support because governments are also thinking about supply chain issues and how to make sure those are resilient. So there is lots in public private cooperation. And we believe that sovereign wealth funds are great partners for private businesses. Thank you. Mr. Craig, I have two questions for you. The first one, in response to your comments, which is about connectivity, how do we avoid going back into our shells? The second one, if I may ask you both together, what's the role and responsibility for media platforms, data platforms in ensuring that information is used to diffuse risk and not maliciously contribute to it? Gosh, so connectivity, I'll take the first question. I mean, we're incredibly connected. It's almost impossible to imagine many global companies not operating in the way that they do today. So I don't necessarily subscribe to the idea that suddenly we will retrench back to our national borders. It's almost impossible to think of that really happening for most major companies, certainly technology companies to do that. So I think the approach has to be, how do I work in a very connected world? And I think something in our mindset that we have to change is that I was listening to Anne's comments about resilience and redundancy. We look at it as capacity. And actually, if you build networks that can increase capacity in the moment, we live in a very volatile world. So actually, we have to put more capacity aside on any given day to deal with the peaks and troughs. What you actually end up finding that you're doing is you're in effect building a redundancy system. But actually, it's not an extra cost because you need it in any case. So you have parallel runs, you have parallel teams, you have teams that are cross skilled in different countries and different parts of the world to do similar roles and similar jobs. And so there are ways of actually managing through this. And I think, again, we've just got to change our mindset. The mindset that you had a big spare office outside the center of London and that all of your traders went there in a pandemic is, do you remember in the early days of this, they tried that and it obviously didn't work. I mean, we just have to change our mindset. We always respond to the last crisis to design for the next one. And I think what we've learned from this is that actually having everyone and every employee isolated in their own home, and we have thousands of BCT sensors, if you like, it's their own home, no one predicted that. But how do we enable it? Now we should think about the next crisis. I worry about technology risk as being from my seat and where I am. And how do we think about building capacity and redundancy and protection into our technology networks as well? I think it's something that all of us need to consider very, very carefully, particularly as we're relying much, much more on third parties like cloud-based analytics and solutions, which do give tremendous redundancy, but also give risks as well. On social media and using data platforms, I mean, the search for truth in these pandemics is very hard. And the amount of misinformation that's generated from all sources, not just government, but individuals and other areas and trusted parties is terrible. One thing that we found is that actually in this situation, we have 18,500 employees. Actually, our employees have looked to us for the truth, the employer, when often the government saw the news information sources aren't giving them the information they need. We've stepped up and actually helped them to understand what's happening when a vaccine's arriving and those things. So I do think that this is a real challenge and that actually companies have had to step into this void, frankly, to help supply some of the information that, frankly, people need to trust from some source somewhere because they're getting fed a lot of noise that just isn't right. Thank you. And with that, we come to the end of this public segment of our discussion.