Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Corporate Risk Director

🎯 Role Definition

As Corporate Risk Director, you will lead the design, implementation, and continual enhancement of the enterprise risk management (ERM) program to protect corporate value, enable strategic objectives, and ensure regulatory compliance. This senior leadership role partners with finance, operations, legal, compliance, internal audit, and business unit leaders to identify, assess, mitigate, report, and monitor material risks across credit, market, liquidity, operational, strategic, and third-party domains. The Corporate Risk Director translates risk appetite into actionable frameworks and risk controls, drives risk culture and governance, and delivers clear, data-driven insights to the executive team and the board.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Risk Manager with cross-functional ERM experience
Head of Operational Risk or Operational Risk Manager
Enterprise Risk Manager or Risk Analytics Lead

Advancement To:

Chief Risk Officer / Head of Risk
Executive Vice President, Enterprise Risk & Compliance
Chief Compliance Officer or Board Risk Committee Member

Lateral Moves:

Director of Internal Audit
Director of Regulatory Compliance
Head of Third-Party / Vendor Risk Management

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop, own, and maintain a comprehensive Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework, including risk taxonomy, risk appetite statement, policies, procedures, and escalation protocols that align with corporate strategy and regulatory expectations.
Lead enterprise-wide risk identification initiatives, facilitating structured risk workshops with business leaders to surface emerging strategic, operational, financial, and compliance risks and to prioritize risks by likelihood and impact.
Design and implement quantitative and qualitative risk assessment methodologies, including scenario analysis, stress testing, risk scoring, and heat maps, to provide consistent and defensible risk ratings across business units.
Establish and operationalize the corporate risk appetite and tolerance metrics; monitor exposures against appetite and provide timely escalation and remediation plans when thresholds are breached.
Build and manage a consolidated risk register and issue-tracking process that ensures risks are owned, actions are tracked to closure, and remediation effectiveness is validated.
Oversee the development of enterprise-level risk indicators (KRIs), dashboards, and automated reporting to provide senior leadership and the board with clear, actionable, and timely risk intelligence.
Lead stress testing and reverse stress testing exercises to evaluate business continuity and capital/liquidity resilience under adverse scenarios; work with finance to quantify impacts and mitigation strategies.
Drive third-party and vendor risk assessment processes, including due diligence, ongoing monitoring, contractual risk clauses, and remediation oversight to mitigate supply chain and outsourcing risks.
Partner with legal and compliance to interpret regulatory requirements (e.g., Basel, Dodd-Frank, SOX, GDPR, industry-specific rules), translate them into operational controls, and ensure programmatic compliance and reporting readiness.
Design control frameworks and coordinate with internal audit to ensure testing coverage, remediation tracking, and continuous improvement of internal controls for operational risk, fraud prevention, and business continuity.
Lead cross-functional programs to remediate systemic risk issues, including project governance, resource allocation, stakeholder alignment, and progress reporting to executive sponsors and the board.
Develop and maintain risk models and analytics capabilities (credit scoring, concentration analysis, market risk models) in collaboration with analytics teams to quantify exposures and forecast potential losses.
Own capital and balance-sheet risk reporting related to credit, market and liquidity risk exposures; collaborate with treasury and finance on capital planning and stress test outputs.
Provide governance and oversight of risk-related approvals (policy exceptions, risk acceptance) by establishing clear delegation of authority, documentation standards, and committee formulations.
Coach, mentor, and lead a team of risk professionals; define role accountabilities, performance metrics and career development plans to build a high-performing risk function.
Design and deliver risk training and awareness programs to business unit leaders and staff, embedding risk culture and ensuring consistent risk language and practices across the enterprise.
Lead incident response and root-cause investigations for material operational losses, regulatory findings, or significant control failures, ensuring timely corrective action plans and lessons learned.
Coordinate with external stakeholders — regulators, rating agencies, auditors, and board committees — to present the firm’s risk posture, remediation plans, and governance updates with clarity and integrity.
Manage vendor relationships for GRC/risk technology platforms (e.g., risk registers, workflow, reporting tools); define requirements, oversee implementations, and ensure data integrity across systems.
Oversee data governance and risk data quality initiatives to ensure the accuracy, timeliness, and completeness of risk information used to support decision-making and regulatory reporting.
Drive continuous improvement through benchmarking, industry best practices, and adoption of new risk methodologies or technologies (e.g., advanced analytics, machine learning for risk detection).

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc risk data requests and exploratory analytics to inform business cases, M&A diligence, and new product approvals.
Contribute to the organization's risk technology roadmap and vendor selection, ensuring scalability and alignment with enterprise data architecture.
Collaborate with business units and IT to translate risk requirements into system specifications and automated controls.
Participate in executive and risk committee meetings, prepare pack materials, and ensure action items are tracked and resolved.
Support periodic internal and external audit engagements by providing documents, risk evidence, and remediation progress updates.
Serve as a subject matter expert for regulatory examinations and external reviews; prepare responses and remediation programs.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) framework design and implementation
Risk appetite and tolerance setting, monitoring, and reporting
Quantitative risk modeling: scenario analysis, stress testing, credit and market risk modeling
Operational risk control frameworks, loss data collection, and root-cause analysis
Regulatory knowledge and compliance (Basel, SOX, Dodd-Frank, GDPR, applicable industry regulations)
Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) platforms (e.g., RSA Archer, MetricStream, ServiceNow GRC)
Risk reporting and visualization tools (Power BI, Tableau, Qlik) and strong Excel modeling skills
Statistical and data analysis tools (SQL, Python, R) for risk analytics and data preparation
Vendor and third-party risk assessment methodologies and contractual risk mitigation
Internal controls design, testing, and remediation tracking; familiarity with audit processes
Credit risk, market risk, liquidity risk, and concentration risk assessment techniques
Data governance fundamentals and data quality controls for risk reporting

Soft Skills

Strategic thinking with the ability to align risk strategy to business objectives and board priorities
Executive-level communication and board reporting experience; ability to present complex risk issues clearly
Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills across business, finance, legal, and IT
Leadership and team development: coaching, mentoring, and building a high-performance culture
Decision-making under uncertainty and the ability to prioritize in ambiguous situations
Problem-solving orientation with a continuous improvement mindset
Ethical judgment, integrity, and the ability to foster a risk-aware culture
Project management skills including program governance and change management
Collaborative orientation with a track record of partnering cross-functionally
Resilience and adaptability in dynamic regulatory and business environments

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, Accounting, Business Administration, Mathematics, Statistics, Engineering, or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree (MBA, MSc Finance, MSc Risk Management) or advanced certification (CFA, FRM, PRM, CIA).
Executive education in risk governance, board reporting, or financial regulation.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Finance or Economics
Risk Management, Actuarial Science, or Statistics
Accounting, Business Administration, or Law
Data Science, Computer Science, or Engineering (for quantitative risk roles)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 10–15+ years of progressive risk management experience, with 5+ years in a senior leadership role.

Preferred:

12–20 years of experience across enterprise risk functions, with demonstrated leadership of ERM programs in financial services, insurance, fintech, or large regulated corporates.
Proven track record of interacting with executive leadership and board risk committees, driving risk strategy and remediation at scale.
Experience implementing or operating GRC platforms, leading stress-testing programs, and managing regulatory examinations.
Background in leading cross-functional risk transformation initiatives, building analytics capabilities, and enhancing risk culture across distributed organizations.