Clifford Rossi Directory Page

Dr. Rossi is Professor-of-the-Practice, Director of the Smith Enterprise Risk Consortium and Executive-in-Residence at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Rossi had nearly 25 years’ risk management experience in banking and government, having held senior executive roles at several of the largest financial services companies. He is a well-established expert in risk management with particular interests in financial risk management, climate risk, supply chain and health and safety risk issues.

His last industry position was Managing Director and Chief Risk Officer for Citigroup’s Consumer Lending Group where he was responsible for overseeing the risk of a $300+B global portfolio of mortgage, home equity, student loans and auto loans with 700 employees under his direction. While there he was intimately involved in Citi’s TARP and stress test activities. He also served as Chief Credit Officer at Washington Mutual (WaMu), Managing Director and Chief Risk Officer at Countrywide Bank and Chief Economist and Chief Analytics Officer at Radian Guaranty.

Before these assignments, Dr. Rossi held senior risk management positions at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. He was co-inventor of 3 patents on credit risk derivative instruments while at Freddie Mac. He started his career during the thrift crisis at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Domestic Finance and later at the Office of Thrift Supervision working on key policy issues affecting depositories. Dr. Rossi was also an adjunct professor in the Finance Department at the Robert H. Smith School of Business for eight years and has numerous academic and nonacademic articles on banking industry topics. Dr. Rossi is frequently quoted on financial policy issues in major newspapers and has appeared on such programs as Fox News, Canada’s BNN, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and CNN’s Situation Room.

His practitioner-oriented and graduate textbook, A Risk Professional’s Survival Guide: Applied Best Practices in Risk Management for John Wiley & Sons, Inc. was released Fall 2014. He also authored a weekly column, Risk Doctor in the American Banker and in HousingWire on risk and regulatory reform issues and CRO Outlook for the Global Association of Risk Professionals. He has testified before Congress on a number of financial policy and climate risk issues. Dr. Rossi serves as an advisor to banks, federal regulatory agencies, private equity investment companies and hedge funds on banking and regulatory topics and founded Chesapeake Risk Advisors, LLC a financial risk management consulting practice in 2009. He received his PhD from Cornell University in financial economics and quantitative methods.