Richard Christopher Whalen is Senior Vice President and a Managing Director of IRA with general responsibility for sales and business development. Chris has worked as an investment banker, research analyst and journalist for more than two decades.

After graduating from Villanova University in 1981, Chris worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and then as a management trainee at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he worked in the bank supervision and foreign exchange departments. Chris subsequently worked in the fixed income department of Bear, Stearns & Co, in London.

After moving back to the U.S. in 1988, Chris spent a decade providing risk management and loan workout services to multinational companies and government agencies operating in Latin America. He provided due-diligence and credit workout services to a number of multinational clients operating in Mexico, including the Export-Import Bank of the US, Kroll Associates and Weyerhaeuser (NYSE:WY), and served as an adviser to the presidential campaign of Cuauhtémoc Cardenas Solórzano.

In 1997, Chris went back to Wall Street, working as an investment banker in the M&A Group of Bear, Stearns & Co. and later Prudential Securities where he focused on the technology sector. He then served as the managing director of The Free Internet Group Ltd., one of the largest independent Internet service providers in the UK.

In 2001, Chris returned to the investment world, working as an investment banker at Fechtor, Detwiler & Co. and an equity research analyst at Ramberg, Whalen & Co., where he followed names such as IBM (NYSE:IBM), Apple Computer (NASDAQ:AAPL), Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO).

Chris edits IRA’s popular newsletter, The Institutional Risk Analyst, and heads IRA's financial advisory operations. He contributes to such publications as the American Banker, The Financial Times and GARP Risk Review. Chris has appeared before the US Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission to testify on various types of financial issues and appears regularly on venues such as Bloomberg Television and CNBC to speak on topics such as investing, risk management, Basel II and the banking and financial sectors.

Chris is a member of Professional Risk Managers International Association (www.prmia.org) and volunteers as a regional director of PRMIA's Washington, DC chapter.

Learn more about Chris Whalen at www.rcwhalen.com

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