Last week I had the privilege again of hosting a Compliance Week editorial roundtable, this time gathering a dozen chief risk officers in the financial sector to hear their thoughts on the current challenges of risk management in their industry—which are more complicated than the risk management challenges in most other industries. As usual, we’ll have in-depth coverage of their discussion in one of our newsletters later this month. But let me fire off a few preliminary observations while I’m here…
First, this crowd is really anxious about what regulations might come out of Washington to confront them later this year. We went around the room asking each attendee his or her biggest worry for 2010, and almost all of them cited some sort of fear that they won’t understand what Washington expects of them or (more likely) that Washington won’t understand what corporate risk-management efforts are able to do. Given some of the obtuse questions I’ve seen lawmakers ask Wall Street executives during any number of hearings Congress has held recently, I’d say this fear is well-founded.
