Pascal vander Straeten has a passion for geopolitics and global finance. He has extensive experience in risk management across institutional and corporate banking, project finance, commercial real estate, sovereign lending and emerging markets, working successfully in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Luxembourg, and Belgium. In 2012, he founded Value4Risk in Australia, consulting on geofinance, tail risk management, and business resilience. And in 2015 he expanded the business to the United States where he is currently based. He holds an executive MBA from the University of Washington, a postgraduate degree in international relations from Université Catholique de Louvain, bachelor's and master's degrees in applied economics from the University of Antwerpen, and a PhD in economics from the University of Leicester's School of Management. He has written several books on geofinance and risk management, and the latest is about to be published by Palgrave MacMillan early March this year.