Chief Risk Officer
Ally
Stephanie Richard is the chief risk officer of Ally Financial Inc. Appointed to the role in November 2024, Richard is responsible for overseeing the identification, assessment and management of risks across the organization and ensuring the company’s risk strategy supports business goals and objectives. She works closely with senior leadership to develop policies and frameworks to safeguard the company’s financial stability and reputation. Richard reports to the risk committee of the board of directors and to Ally’s CEO.
Since joining Ally in 1997, Richard has had a long and respected reputation with key stakeholders and helped design the company’s initial risk appetite framework and stress testing process. She has served in numerous roles with increasing levels of responsibility across finance, treasury and risk management. Since Ally became a bank holding company in 2008, she has played an integral part in many of the company’s transformation initiatives. Prior to her current role, Richard served as Ally’s chief audit executive where she led the internal audit function and had administrative oversight for the company’s loan review function. During that time, she established a strategic focus on the transformation of the internal audit function, with efforts on cultivating innovation and expanding the use of technology and data analytics.
Richard serves as a board member and treasurer for Dress for Success’s Charlotte chapter and as treasurer for Project Scientist, a leading STEAM education nonprofit organization. She is also a member of the advisory board for the Wake Forest University School of Professional Studies’ enterprise risk management program. Additionally, she previously served as president of Women Executives for Community Service (WECS), a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide support to women pursuing a degree through the Women Initiating and Nurturing Growth through Scholarships (WINGS) program.
In 2022, Richard was an honoree for Charlotte Business Journal’s Women in Business Achievement Awards. She holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Michigan State University and an MBA from Wayne State University.
As artificial intelligence reshapes how financial services operate, it is also fundamentally redefining the nature of fraud and cybersecurity risk. What was once managed as a perimeter defense or a back-office risk function has become a continuous, enterprise-wide leadership challenge—where threats evolve in real time, at machine speed, across every customer interaction and internal workflow.
This panel brings together senior banking and financial services leaders to explore how the AI era is forcing a redefinition of ownership, accountability, and decision-making in cybersecurity and fraud prevention. Synthetic identities, deepfake-enabled authorization attacks, and fully automated fraud chains are no longer theoretical risks—they are active forces reshaping trust, customer experience, and operational resilience.
The conversation will focus on what leadership looks like in this environment: how executives balance innovation with security, how accountability is structured when AI systems participate in decision-making, and how institutions can shift from reactive defense models to proactive, AI-native risk governance. At its core, this is a discussion about leadership under conditions where trust, speed, and security are now inseparable.