EMPYREAN SOLUTIONS – THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES
Transforming Treasury
An eight-volume series on interest rate risk, model governance, and the future of balance sheet management in U.S. banking.
Brian Gilbert — Chief Banking Officer, Empyrean Solutions
Fireside chat — July 28, 2026 • Volumes 1 & 2 publish July 28, 2026
70%
of consolidated U.S. bank revenue is net interest income — and the risk that drives it is still measured with tools built for a calmer era.
2 of 3
major U.S. banking crises since 1980 were, at their origin, interest rate risk failures — the S&L crisis and the 2022–2023 regional bank failures.
9,000
banks and credit unions need this expertise. The talent gap to staff it institution-by-institution cannot be closed by hiring alone.
The fireside chat
Ahead of publication, Brian Gilbert sits down with Laurent Birade to introduce the Five Pillars framework and preview what the series argues. Stream now to see the full conversation.
Transforming Treasury
A conversation on why interest rate risk has driven two of the last three major U.S. banking crises, what the Five Pillars framework prescribes, and what the series covers over the months that follow.
The Five Pillars of a Shareholder Approach
Not a way to satisfy an examiner — a way to genuinely understand and manage the balance sheet. Each pillar depends on the one before it, except the fifth, which spans all four.
Data Integrity
Accurate contractual cash flows for every instrument, before any behavioral assumption is layered on top.
Behavioral Modeling
Capturing the non-linear relationship between rate movements and deposit migration — not a static decay rate.
Stochastic Modeling
Hundreds of rate paths, not parallel shocks — making the tail of the distribution visible before it arrives.
Programmatic Hedging
Caps and floors purchased systematically to cover both legs of the balance sheet’s short strangle.
Funds Transfer Pricing
Pricing the risk of every transaction back to the business unit that created it, at the moment it’s created.
The release ledger
Eleven documents, released across roughly five months. Each builds on the credibility of the one before it. Register once and every volume lands in your inbox the day it publishes.
| Ref | Title | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Webinar | The Fireside Chat: Introducing the Five Pillars Brian Gilbert & Laurent Birade | Jul 28, 2026 | Stream coming soon |
| Vol. 1 | The Crisis Nobody Saw Coming—Again Setting the stakes: IRR as systemic risk | Jul 28, 2026 | Download |
| Vol. 2 | The Flawed Foundation Why NII-at-Risk and EVE are failing banks | Jul 28, 2026 | Download |
| Vol. 3 | The Short Strangle No One Hedges A framework for convexity risk management | Aug 12, 2026 | Scheduled |
| Vol. 4 | The Shareholder Standard and the Five Pillars Pillars 1–3: seeing the balance sheet correctly | Aug 26, 2026 | Scheduled |
| Vol. 5 | The Programmatic Hedge Building the hedge; a practitioner’s account | Sep 9, 2026 | Scheduled |
| Vol. 6 | FTP as Risk Management, Not Incentive Architecture Pillar 5: completing the framework | Sep 23, 2026 | Scheduled |
| Vol. 7 | Model Risk in the Rate Cycle SR 26-2, behavioral models, and the AI governance gap | Oct 7, 2026 | Scheduled |
| Vol. 8 | The Treasury Department of 2030 A shareholder approach at every institution | Oct 21, 2026 | Scheduled |
| Companion | Testing the Programmatic Hedge Technical Companion — the quantitative break-even case | Nov 3, 2026 | Scheduled |
| Essay | Fragile by Design A practitioner application of Taleb’s Incerto | Nov 24, 2026 | Scheduled |
| Essay | Beyond the Five Pillars Gaps, systemic risk, and the policy frontier | Dec 15, 2026 | Scheduled |