Michael Conover
Partner
KPMG
Excellence in Financial Services
Like just about everybody who has worked on Wall Street or in the financial
services sector, Michael Conover still has trouble putting what just happened
to the sector in perspective. “You just can’t prepare for the
whole market going away the way it did,” Conover says. “That is
not on anyone’s stress test scenarios or anyone’s list of
possible outcomes. I certainly didn’t see this coming, and neither did
my clients.”
Conover, a partner and the founding leader of KPMG’s Financial Risk
Management practice in New York, says that the sector is still struggling to
make sense of it. “Everyone has sort of put things on hold,” he
says. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
And as a 27-year financial services veteran and former Wall Street banker,
Conover’s seen plenty in his time. He basically built KPMG’s
Financial Risk Management practice from scratch, and today it has 200
professionals.“ This is an industry in transformation right now.
It’s difficult because there’s so much uncertainty in the
marketplace, and there are not a lot of details out there right now,”
Conover says. “And we had a change of in Washington. I think people are
just sort of waiting for the rules to be written.” In the meantime, he
says, the clients that are spending are asking for more senior-level
brainstorming and strategy work, and risk management is back on the front
burner.
“Risk management was probably viewed more of a compliance function and
the business units saw it as a back office or middle office kind of
role,” he says. “But not any more.”
Meanwhile, Conover is feeling the effects of the recession firsthand.
Recently, Conover and his wife took up golf and put in an application to join
a country club near their home. “Usually, there’s a several year
waiting list, but we got in right away because they had so many people either
leave the club or drop off the waiting list,” Conover says. “Now,
I really need to learn how to play.”
—Joseph Kornik
