Advisory

Read the world, price the risk, build the thing that lets you act on it.

Two practices, one discipline. Whether the risk is geopolitical or institutional, the work is the same: name the exposure, quantify it, and turn it into a decision.

Practice I: The read

Country & geopolitical risk.

Firms come to us with the country nobody has written up, the counterparty whose ownership nobody has traced, the corridor or exposure nobody has priced. We read primary sources, in the original language where that matters.

For investors, funds, boards & operators

In the published work

The price normalised. The strait did not.

Brent reached $117 in April and has since given back about sixty per cent of the move. Over the same months, tanker transits through the Strait of Hormuz stayed at roughly a tenth of normal.

Read the analysis →
Tanker transits through the Strait of Hormuz
Daily tanker transits, monthly average
Under five a day since March015304560Sep 25Nov 25Jan 26Mar 26May 26Aug 261.3
Renard chokepoint monitor, AIS vessel transit counts, September 2025 to 16 August 2026.
Coverage
Country Risk Assessment

A full file on a country the desk does not yet cover: the five pillars computed, the judgment layer written, and a read that says what would have to change for the score to move.

Forward-Looking
Sovereign Scenario Analysis

A named path, whether sanctions, a devaluation, a succession or a border closure, carried through to what it does to your exposure, with the assumptions stated so they can be argued with.

Counterparty
Ownership & Control Tracing

Who actually owns the firm, across the corporate register, the leak record and the state’s own structure. This is the question a name on a contract does not answer.

Sanctions
Sanctions Exposure Review

Your counterparties and their owners read against the designation lists and the regimes behind them, with the secondary-sanctions reach stated rather than assumed.

Supply
Supply & Embargo Exposure

Pull a supplier out and see what cannot be replaced. That is the counterfactual behind every sanctions argument, measured against what the registers actually record moving.

Trade
Corridor & Chokepoint Assessment

Which ports, corridors and straits your goods depend on, what each one carries, and what a closure of any of them does to the route and to the cost.

Also within the practice
  • US policy analysis. Reading US foreign policy, the Federal Reserve's trajectory, and banking & regulatory change for their market and credit consequences.
  • Market entry & counterparty diligence. Local frameworks (UEMOA, BCEAO, OHADA), how deals get done, and who to work with.
  • Counter-terror & illicit-finance risk. Informed by regional programme coordination across the Sahel and the Lake Chad basin.
  • Rates, metals and the macro tape. The Federal Reserve’s path, real yields and official-sector gold demand, read for what they do to a sovereign’s financing and a lender’s book.
  • Bespoke country-risk scoring. Structured, source-weighted scoring frameworks built to a mandate or book.

Decision support only. Not investment, legal, tax, or sanctions-compliance advice.

Practice II: The build

Credit & portfolio risk.

Banks, credit unions and the boards and advisers who answer to examiners retain us for the analysis a filing cannot produce on its own. Documented to survive a validation and an examination.

For banks, lenders & finance teams

In the published work

The failure was in the filings.

Tioga-Franklin's last Call Report showed its liquidity as the strongest thing about it. Its capital and problem assets had been public, quarterly and unambiguous for two and a half years, ending at a Texas ratio of 257%.

Read the analysis →
Capital falling into problem assets
Percent, Tioga-Franklin Savings Bank
03691223Q123Q324Q124Q325Q125Q326Q1First nonaccrual, first loss3.4Equity / assets6.7Nonaccrual / loans
FFIEC Call Reports, RSSD 885579, computed from reported dollars
Stress Testing
Top-Down Stress Test

Lynx runs the standing version on your filed numbers. The engagement builds the scenarios to your book, to your concentrations, your funding and your growth plan, and produces the documented run an examiner or a board can be walked through.

Stress Testing
Bottom-Up Stress Test

The loan-level counterpart, which no filing supports: your loan file, borrower by borrower, aggregated back up and reconciled to the top-down result. The gap between the two is usually the finding.

Portfolio
Concentration Reports

Beyond the CRE prongs the platform tracks against the 100/300 guidance: industry, geography, borrower and guarantor concentration on your own exposures, with limits, migration and the policy language to support them.

Underwriting
Underwriting Services

Deal-level credit analysis: borrower and guarantor strength, structure and covenants, and a documented second look before commitment. The one service here that starts from a credit file rather than a filing.

Forward-Looking
Scenario Analysis

Scenario Studio drives rates, credit and growth through your capital and earnings inside the platform. The engagement is where the assumptions get built and defended: what path, on what evidence, and what it would take to be wrong.

Regulatory
Regulatory Intelligence Assessment

The platform tracks the rulemaking, guidance and enforcement stream and flags what touches your profile. The assessment is the read on top: what applies to you, on what timetable, and what to do about it before the exam.

Also within the practice
  • Liquidity & interest-rate risk. Funding ladders by time bucket, uninsured deposit behaviour, and the rate path driven through earnings and capital.
  • Monitoring & early warning. Watchlist rules and dashboards built to a specific book, with the data pipelines behind them.
  • Peer selection & benchmarking. Comparison groups built on loan mix, funding and geography rather than asset size, with the definition written down first.
  • Model governance & validation support. Development standards, procedure documentation, and validation-ready model management.
  • Board and examiner reporting. The standing quarterly read written up so a committee can act on it and an examiner can follow it.
  • Investor-grade financial models. Reconciled models, scenario engines, and investor credit memos.

Decision support only. Not accounting, audit, or investment advice.

Coverage

Markets we analyse.

Three markets, followed daily and in depth, from the macro tape down to the individual bank, sovereign or sanctions regime that carries the risk.

Banks · Credit · Rates

United States

The home market, read where risk actually lives: the individual institution. Lynx analyses every FFIEC and NCUA filing in the country, with rates and metals as the macro overlay.

Bank & CU analyticsStress & scenariosPolicy & macroSupervision
See Lynx →
Country risk · Sanctions · Sovereigns

CIS

The post-Soviet space, read from primary sources most Western firms treat as a black box. Russian-language fluency and a long-standing academic focus on the region turn opacity into an edge.

Political riskSanctionsSovereign solvencyMarket & FX
See Renard →
Banking systems · Sovereigns · BRVM

West Africa

Firsthand knowledge of the regional frameworks, BRVM, BCEAO and OHADA, applied across the wider region: the banking systems, the sovereigns that stand behind them, and the country risk underneath both.

Banking systemsSovereign creditSecurityMarket entry
See Renard →
Engagements

Three ways to work together.

Take a seat in the platform, commission a defined deliverable, or retain standing counsel. Most relationships begin with one piece of work and deepen.

Platform

Access to Lynx or Renard

A seat for your team: the standing quarterly read on your own institution, or the country files and the desks behind them, refreshed as the filings and the data land, with the board pack included.
From $12,000 a year per institution: six seats, invoiced, never self-serve. Founding rate $8,000 for anyone signing by 31 December 2026
Most requested
Project

Fixed-Scope Engagement

A defined deliverable with a fixed fee and a date: a stress test built to your book, a concentration report, a country written up, an ownership trace, or a monitoring tool built to your data.
Scoped & fixed-fee: priced per engagement
Retainer

Advisory Retainer

Standing counsel for firms operating where the map is unclear: on-call analysis, priority turnaround, and someone who already knows your book and your exposure before you call.
By arrangement: scoped to the year, not the month
Selected work

Evidence, not adjectives.

A sample of past engagements across the practices. Some detail is generalized to respect client confidentiality.

01
Bank credit-risk infrastructure
Stress-test dashboards, model-governance documentation and allowance automation across a large C&I and CRE portfolio, built to survive a validation and an examination, not only to produce a number.
Credit Risk
02
Belarus Country Dossier
A full country read covering political, fiscal, sanctions and counterparty exposure, commissioned by companies weighing entry into the market, and carried through from the assessment to what it would cost them.
Country Risk
03
Lumi Dental, Dubai
Investor-grade financial model, scenario engine, business plan and credit memo for a boutique medical-tourism venture, reconciled so that the four documents could not disagree with one another.
Financial Modeling
04
Behavioral-health clinic, Abidjan
Full projections and business plan for a facility operating under a dual US and local entity structure, where the structure itself drove most of the assumptions.
Modeling · Market Entry