Faizan Amir ’26

I work in a regulatory role at the State Bank of Pakistan, where I help assess the safety and soundness of the country’s financial sector. More recently, I was deployed to the bank’s resolution function, which is responsible for managing bank failures in a way that protects financial stability and minimizes costs to taxpayers and the public.

The Master’s Degree in Systemic Risk was one of the few programs that was directly aligned with my background and the direction I wanted to grow in. I have over seven years of experience as a financial sector supervisor, but it felt like the right time to step away from my day-to-day work, learn from a global perspective, and return with a broader and more practical understanding of financial stability and crisis preparedness.

This program covers all aspects of financial stability, from macroprudential policy and regulatory standards to crisis management and monetary policy. I’ve really appreciated the analytical rigor required in our coursework and the thorough feedback provided by professors. It pushes you to sharpen your critical thinking skills and engage with issues more deeply. Alongside my core courses, I chose electives such as Financial Econometrics & Machine Learning and Fixed Income Strategies to build on my quantitative and analytical skills.

In emerging countries like Pakistan, most policymaking still evolves in an ad hoc manner, and policies are often adopted from other jurisdictions without fully accounting for local institutional realities. One of my most important takeaways from the program has been learning how to ground policy decisions in empirical, evidence-based work and tailor them to the specific vulnerabilities of our own financial sector.

Through the program, we’ve interacted with leading policymakers, regulators, and officials from institutions like the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Union’s Single Resolution Board, the IMF, and the BIS. I also had the opportunity to facilitate knowledge sharing between the State Bank of Pakistan, the European Union, and the Bank of England. We’re now organizing capacity-building sessions with the FDIC as well. This was a key highlight for me—being able to do something for my colleagues back home while in this program.

My cohort brings a lot of value to the classroom. They come from different central banks and financial institutions around the world, and each country has its own unique set of rules, regulations, and challenges. Their perspectives have made the experience really enriching. Now, I’m bringing what I’ve learned back home to help address systemic risk challenges and further strengthen the financial stability policy framework in Pakistan.