My favorite phrase in describing what I did for the last twenty years is "prepare to be wrong." I'm Jon Roman. I managed the capital of Citicorp's holding company parent from 1986-1992 and Fannie Mae from 1992- 2005. I started consulting in late 2008 after fielding numerous calls over the previous years from former colleagues for free advice. Many told me they wished they had listened to me more closely in my corporate role.

 

My job was to figure out how much capital we needed if the unexpected happened- in short, if our expectations were wrong. In both cases, expectations proved very wrong. The trick in capital is that you cannot and should not allocate capital to cover 100% of risk, but the distinction among 99%, 99.9% and 99.999% confidences are extremely difficult to anticipate or even justify from data, even though it makes a dramatic difference in the capital required.

 

I've run credit, counterparty, treasury, and market risk management and valuation functions as well as running several business groups as far back as the 1980s including structured finance and wholesale mortgage operations. In addition to planning and managing capital, I raised over $30 billion in capital and repurchased or restructured another $10 billion. I worked  closely with the rating agencies for nearly 20 years. I have been though numerous business cycles from the 20%+ rates of the early 80's to the (shockingly) low rates of today.

 

I provide help to small to medium size banks and other financial institutions on:

 

I subtitle what I do as "analysis" rather than "management". I believe management is your job to execute. I can tell you how to manage but as an executive myself, I learned that knowing what to do and ultimately influencing and executing that successfully were two different jobs requiring different skills. I'm here to get you to the point of knowing what to do.

 

Please take a look at my blog to get a feeling of how I approach what I do, my underlying philosophy, and some anecdotes of the experiences that shaped it.