Insights from Allan Brik, CEO of Everysk and Former CRO of $14B Hedge Fund Allocator
When speaking with allocators, risk measuring and monitoring have evolved beyond a control function to a statement of operational discipline. CIOs and CROs are rethinking risk transparency and operational resilience as a strategic edge in investor conversations.
Allan Brik, Co-Founder and CEO of Everysk, draws on a career that bridges quantitative finance, institutional risk management, and enterprise technology. Formerly the Chief Risk Officer at Arden Asset Management, a $14 billion hedge fund allocator, he also held senior roles managing risk at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. With this unique perspective, Allan outlines why traditional risk frameworks are insufficient and how today’s most resilient investment teams transform risk from a defensive task into a strategic advantage.
Introduction
In 2025, institutional investors are navigating a market environment characterized by shocks, rather than cycles. Tariff escalations between the U.S. and its major trading partners, fragile global supply chains, and persistent inflation have made volatility a fixture. However, while the sources of disruption are external, what matters most to allocators is internal: how investment firms manage, monitor, and communicate risk.
CIOs and Chief Risk Officers are realizing that the strength of a firm’s risk framework increasingly signals the strength of the firm itself. Demonstrating functioning operational resilience is mandatory – having checks on data sources and processes with human review built into automated processes signals immense strength in firm operations. In an era where clients demand customization, real-time visibility, and operational excellence, risk transparency has become a trust-building mechanism that separates the prepared from the exposed.
Risk Isn’t Just Defense Anymore. What’s Changed?
Allan Brik: The traditional mindset treated risk management as a brake pedal, something to slow you down and prevent blowups. However, risk is part of the operational model now.
CIOs and CROs at institutional firms tell us that allocators want to know not just the standard risk analytics, but also the operational processes around managing the portfolio risk, i.e. after the metrics are generated there has to be a repeatable way to test those risk metrics against pre-set limits and escalate issues depending on severity, all automatically.
Transparency is mandatory. Risk systems that not only provide automated stress tests, exposures, and scenario modeling, but also automated checks, alerts, and remediation in real time. These processes send a message: we’re in control, we’re operationally sound, and we take risk seriously. This builds trust with investors and allocators. In today’s fundraising environment, trust is the currency.
How Has Volatility Reshaped Risk Expectations in 2025?
Allan Brik: The old assumption was that you’d use historical correlations or fixed regimes to model risk. Now, with tariff shocks, political instability, and climate volatility, markets shift faster than static models can keep up.
Funds are judged by how quickly they can manage exposures, flag exceptions, and respond to what’s next, not what already happened. The firms succeeding in this environment are those that have operationalized that agility.
SMAs and Investor-Specific Constraints Are Growing Rapidly. What Does That Mean for Risk Operations?
Allan Brik: It means one-size-fits-all no longer works. If you manage 40 SMAs, each with different guidelines, sector caps, exclusions, or duration bands, you need infrastructure that adapts to those client-level constraints without bottlenecks.
Allocators expect their mandates to be enforced and monitored continuously, not reconciled after the fact. That level of real-time precision requires customization at scale, and unless it’s built into your core processes, it becomes a drag on both risk and operations.
What Are Some Signs That a Firm’s Risk Infrastructure Is Falling Behind?
Allan Brik: The biggest red flag? When portfolio managers need to email risk teams for data that resides in six different places. Or when reporting takes days instead of minutes. These are symptoms of a fragmented technology stack.
If your risk reporting is backward-looking, if alerts aren’t triggered intraday, or if you’re still consolidating exposures manually in spreadsheets, it’s inefficient, but also poses an operational liability. Allocators see this as a governance weakness.
With the widespread increase in private credit investments, how will modern risk systems adapt to manage and monitor risk?
Allan Brik: Private credit and structured credit require risk systems that can address a different set of risks than market volatility. Operational risks are at the forefront and require other techniques compared to a traditional risk system.
Extracting covenants from contracts, testing eligibility of assets, comparing covenants from servicer files, monitoring asset-liability mismatches in CLOs using loan inventory files, and more.
The advent of modular systems that allow traditional risk calculations but also incorporate unstructured-structured extraction capabilities as well as data exploration, will enable risks to be specialized within the same framework.
Looking Ahead: What Will Define the Future of Risk Operations?
Allan Brik: Context and continuity. Modern risk operations need to go beyond flagging problems and explain why they matter and what changed. AI will help here, surfacing trends that humans might miss and embedding them directly into workflows.
The future is also about integrating risk into trading, compliance, reporting, and investor communication. The most resilient firms will be the ones that can unify these moving parts without increasing headcount.
Closing Thoughts
Firms are increasingly focused on outsourcing most operational functions to focus on their core strengths. Risk should be produced, analyzed, and remediated on the same platform. Modern, modular systems that bring operational efficiencies will prevail.
Risk management is more than metrics; it’s a message to allocators that a fund is serious about operational resilience. The funds that will lead the next decade are the firms that treat risk and operations as core to the investment process, being adaptable, auditable, and allocator-ready.
Learn how Everysk is helping institutional investors move from reactive to proactive risk management at everysk.com
