Kylie-Anne Richards

Researcher at the intersection of sustainable finance, AI governance, and institutional reasoning.

Senior Lecturer, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney.

About

I work on the empirical and methodological questions that sit between financial markets, sustainability, and frontier artificial intelligence. My research spans three connected themes: the pricing of climate transition risk in sovereign and corporate debt; the statistical modelling of high-frequency financial data using self-exciting point processes and heavy-tailed distributions; and the evaluation of frontier language models on high-stakes institutional reasoning tasks.

I hold a PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of New South Wales, and have over twenty years of domestic and international financial markets experience, including senior roles in sovereign wealth, investment research, and quantitative trading. I teach Sustainable Finance across UTS postgraduate and executive programs.

Current research

aus-reg-bench — An empirical benchmark for evaluating frontier language models on Australian financial regulatory reasoning. A public, reproducible evaluation infrastructure covering ASIC Regulatory Guides, APRA Prudential Standards, and AASB climate disclosure requirements, with an accompanying statistical framework emphasising uncertainty quantification and heavy-tail failure analysis.

github.com/kylieannerichards/aus-reg-bench

Selected publications

AI, cognition, and institutional reasoning

Richards, K-A. (2025). Post-Cognitive Epistemology: Rethinking Knowledge, Authority, and Meaning in the Age of Predictive Language. SSRN: 5332125

Sustainable finance and climate transition

Collender, S., Gan, B., Sklibosios Nikitopoulos, C., Richards, K-A., & Ryan, L. S. (2021). Climate Transition Risk in Sovereign Bond Markets. SSRN: 3861350

Statistical modelling of financial markets

Richards, K-A., Dunsmuir, W. T. M., & Peters, G. W. (2024). Score Test for Marks in Hawkes Processes.

Richards, K-A., Peters, G. W., & Dunsmuir, W. T. M. (2015). Heavy-Tailed Features and Dependence in Limit Order Book Volume Profiles in Futures Markets. SSRN: 2268283

Teaching

Sustainable Finance — Master of Finance, MBA, Executive MBA, Master of Financial Planning, and Microcredential suite. UTS Business School.

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