27th Annual Stanford Directors' College 2022
James Lam
President, James Lam & Associates; Former Risk Committee Chair, E*TRADE
James C. Lam is a risk management consultant and board director. He is president of James Lam & Associates, a risk management consulting firm he founded in 2002. His clients include corporate directors and executives across key sectors, including financial services, energy, technology, healthcare, government entities, and non-profits. In a Euromoney survey, James was nominated by clients and peers as one of the world’s leading risk consultants. He previously served as Founder and President of ERisk, a technology start-up that provided cloud-based analytical solutions to banks, insurance companies, and energy firms. James also served as Partner of Oliver Wyman, where he was the global leader of enterprise risk solutions.
He currently serves as independent board director and audit committee chair of RiskLens and a board director of the FAIR Institute. Previously, James served as chair of the board, audit committee, and compliance committee at Recology and chair of the risk committee and member of the audit committee at E*TRADE Financial (NASDAQ: EFTC).
Recognized as the first-ever chief risk officer, James has implemented ERM programs at global organizations. As Fidelity Investments’ first Chief Risk Officer, he chaired the Global Risk Oversight Committee and provided corporate oversight for 40 institutional and retail businesses worldwide. Fidelity’s ERM program was featured as a best-practice case study in The Economist, Risk Magazine, and Price Waterhouse Review. He was Chief Risk Officer at GE Capital Markets Services, where he led all middle and back office functions, including business strategy, trading oversight, risk management, finance, IT, and operations.
James is the author of Enterprise Risk Management (Wiley, 2003; second edition, 2014), which has ranked #1 best-selling among 25,000 risk management titles on Amazon. The book has been translated into Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, and Korean. His latest book, Implementing Enterprise Risk Management, was published by Wiley in 2017. James served on the COSO ERM Advisory Board that was commissioned to update and improve the COSO ERM Framework. James was named in the NACD D100 (2017, 2018) as one of the most influential corporate directors. For three years (2005, 2006, and 2008), Treasury & Risk Management magazine named him one of the “100 Most Influential People in Finance.” In 1997, James received the inaugural Risk Manager of the Year Award from the Global Association of Risk Professionals.
James graduated summa cum laude with a B.B.A. from Baruch College in 1983 and received an M.B.A. with honors from UCLA in 1989. He was appointed Senior Research Fellow at Peking University. James has guest lectured at Harvard Business School as the subject of a HBS case study. He has completed executive management and corporate director programs at the Harvard and Stanford business schools. James is an NACD Board Leadership Fellow and is on the NACD faculty for their board training programs. He is also on the Carnegie Mellon University faculty for their CRO Executive Certification Program.
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