Risk managers gain new prominence in post-Lehman boardrooms

Pre-Lehman, risk managers used to occupy a place some way down the pecking order within senior management of banks and investment firms. The financial crisis changed all that.

The risk management failures of banks now seem glaringly obvious. The assumption that mathematical models reflected reality, the substitution of human intuition for statistics, the belief that risk can be encapsulated in simple number form: all proved errors the sell-side is now trying to correct.

And then there was the role of risk managers themselves, who were often seen by the top brass as a