It's the job of the middle office, which is generally overseen by a chief risk officer, to identify these lopsided risk positions and get the business units to unwind them. The reporting line is usually through the CFO, so being "the world's best quant," as one insurance executive puts it, isn't enough.

"The challenge is to find somebody who can pry into the mechanics of a very complex simulation engine and also distill elements of that in a very succinct manner and communicate it to very senior management and the board," says Michael Mahaffey, vice president of enterprise risk management at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, Ohio. "If you have a blend of those two things, you're golden."

Mahaffey teaches a class in risk management at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University, and he says that for a young person interested in entering the field, a multi-line insurance company like Nationwide offers the broadest exposure to risk.

Regardless whether that is true, financial risk management is certainly moving beyond Wall Street. Richard Dowd of Dowd Associates Executive Search in White Plains, New York, says the treasury departments of some big consumer companies are now looking for managers to help them manage interest rate and currency risk. The corporations are especially interested in people with technical undergraduate degrees and MBAs in finance, usually from top-20 schools. Strong candidates can command base salaries starting at $150,000 to $200,000 plus bonuses, Dowd says.

Rajat Gupta is one of the financial risk managers Dowd recruited. Gupta, who was trained as an electrical engineer in India and has an MBA from the Thunderbird School in Arizona, has worked in treasury management for about 16 years, the last three at Bunge Ltd., the agriculture and food giant. He says non-financial companies often encounter risks that "come embedded in the business."

These can be anything from balance-sheet assets of a foreign unit that must be translated back into the home currency, to the much more complicated situation where a company has supply-chain partners operating in multiple geographic regions, and doing business in different currencies.

"That could create a very substantial exposure, and potentially move margins by several hundred basis points," says Gupta.

"In some ways," he says, "it's much more of a challenge than doing the same thing at a financial firm."

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