Kristen Walters
Kristen Walters
Chief Risk Officer/Chief Operating Officer
Kristen is a recognized Chief Risk Officer (CRO), Chief Operating Officer (COO) and risk leader in the financial services sector across both buy-side firms (asset managers, hedge funds and asset owners) and large trading and commercial banks with breadth and depth in public and private markets.
She is currently a senior advisor at the Global Association of Risk Professionals focusing on risk measurement and benchmarking for global asset owners (e.g., pension plans) and a lecturer at Columbia University teaching risk management and behavioural biases in investing. Kristen’s deep risk expertise spans 30+ years in investment and enterprise risk management, technology, regulatory compliance and policy, investment strategy and operational platforms.
Previously she was the first stand-alone Chief Risk Officer at Canada Pension Plan Investments (with $500B AUM) and CRO at Natixis Investment Managers, a global $1.4 trillion AUM asset manager. Prior roles included 11 years at BlackRock working directly for the CRO and founding partner to evolve BlackRock’s investment and enterprise risk frameworks, functions, systems, analytics and reporting. Kristen also worked for Goldman Sachs leading “firm-wide” market risk and provided daily analysis across the trading platform to senior management during the 2008 financial crisis.
Earlier in her career she held risk roles at PIMCO, Barclays Capital and KPMG. She started her career in Supervision and Regulation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston during the 1990s banking crisis.
Education. Ms. Walters holds a BBA in Accounting with an Economics minor from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MBA (Finance Concentration) from Babson College, Wellesley, MA.
