Richard Christopher Whalen is Senior Vice President and a Managing Director of IRA with responsibility for sales, marketing and business development. Chris is a general securities principal and has worked as an investment banker, research analyst and journalist for more than two decades.

After graduating from Villanova University in 1981, Chris worked for the U.S. House of Representatives and then as a management trainee at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he worked in the bank supervision and foreign exchange departments. Chris subsequently worked in the fixed income department of Bear, Stearns & Co, in London. After returning to the U.S. in 1988, Chris spent a decade providing risk management and loan workout services to multinational companies and government agencies operating in Latin America. He provided due-diligence and credit workout services to a number of multinational clients operating in Mexico, including the Export-Import Bank of the US, Kroll Associates and Weyerhaeuser, and served as an adviser to the presidential campaign of Cuauhtémoc Cardenas Solórzano. In 1997, Chris returned to Wall Street, working as an investment banker in the M&A Group of Bear, Stearns & Co. and later Prudential Securities where he focused on the technology sector. He then served as the managing director of The Free Internet Group Ltd., one of the largest independent Internet service providers in the UK.

In 2001, Chris returned to investment banking, working as a banker at Fechtor, Detwiler & Co. and an equity research analyst at Ramberg, Whalen & Co., following names such as IBM, Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco Systems. Chris edits a free newsletter, The Institutional Risk Analyst, , and contributes regularly to publications such as Barron's, The International Economy and The Washington Times.