After graduating with honours in Economics at LUISS University in Rome, he obtained an M.Sc. in Economics from the LSE and a Ph.D. from the London Business School. In the summer of 2003 he was a visiting scholar at the Haas School of Business - UC Berkeley.
He joined the Bank's Research Department as an adviser in the Financial markets division, where he contributed to the chapters of the Annual Report on financial markets and on the institutional investors. As of 1995 he was the head of the Financial analysis unit in the Money and financial markets department, where he acted as the Test manager on liquidity analysis for the introduction of the single currency. He later managed the dealing desks on monetary policy and foreign exchange operations. As of 2005 he was the head of the Risk management division, with responsibility for the strategic allocation of foreign exchange reserves and risk control, in particular through the financial crisis started in 2008. As of 2015 he was the deputy head of the Market operations directorate, where he set up the dealing desk for the Corporate Sector Purchase Programme and managed the ELA operations towards some banks undergoing a temporary liquidity shortage.
He was appointed as the Bank of Italy's representative in several missions with the IMF and working groups at the Bank for International Settlements. At the ECB he co-chaired the Monitoring group on impacts of Basel III liquidity regulation on Eurosystem operations; he was a member of the Market Operations Committee until April 2020. Since then he has been the head of the Financial risk management directorate and a member of the ECB's Risk Management Committee.
He managed the publication of the Responsible investment charter of the Bank, in 2021, and the launch of the annual Report on sustainable investments and climate-related risks, in 2022.
He has published a book on Financial risk management and climate change risk - The experience in a central bank (Springer, 2023, formerly published in Italian with Bancaria Editrice). His research, appearing in international academic journals, deals with the Treasury bond market, the management of foreign exchange reserves, the impact of prudential regulation on bank behaviour, and corporate lending on the bond market.
In 2023 his study on "The cost of unconventional monetary policy measures. A risk manager's perspective" (with M. Fruzzetti, G. Gariano and G. Palazzo) won the Best Paper Award for Market Risk from the International Risk Management Conference. In the same year his study on "Asymmetric information and corporate lending: Evidence from SME bond markets" (with A. Iannamorelli, S. Nobili and L. Zaccaria) won the BME Award to the Best Paper on Fixed Income Markets from the Spanish Finance Association - AEFIN.
