Featured Speaker

Erin Callan Montella

Erin Callan was the chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers and a member of its Executive Committee during the height of the financial crisis from late 2007 until mid-2008. Prior to holding the CFO position, she held various business head positions over a dozen years throughout the investment bank including establishing de novo and heading its hedge fund coverage business and new products businesses. Erin was a corporate tax lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, a New York-based law firm for five years prior to joining Lehman Brothers in 1995. Erin graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1987 and thereafter received a law degree from NYU Law School in 1990. Most recently, Erin is the author of Full Circle, a memoir which recounts her dramatic personal journey to become the highest-ranking woman on Wall Street during the financial crisis as chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers, sacrificing any semblance of work-life balance along the way, and the challenging return to the fundamental grounding of her childhood. Full Circle has been widely acclaimed described as “stunning” and “an insider's perspective that will engross people” by Fortune, “a unique perspective of the events that led to the financial crisis" by the Wall Street Journal and it “reads as something of a love story. It is an ode to a man she calls her savior and hero, Anthony Montella, a retired firefighter... From the title onward, Full Circle is about Callan's pointed decision to lean out,” according to Vanity Fair. Erin’s tenure as CFO of Lehman Brothers extended through the Bear Stearns collapse and ended prior to Lehman’s bankruptcy filing. She was the public face of Lehman during this tumultuous period and her role was widely covered by the media both at the time and in the aftermath of the crisis. She was recognized in 2007 as a “Woman to Watch” by Fortune Magazine in their annual review of the “Most Powerful Women in Business” and the Wall Street Journal. The New York Post ranked her as the third most powerful woman in New York in 2008. Erin grew up In Douglaston, New York, a neighborhood in Queens. She is married to Anthony Montella and has a daughter, Margaret Mary Montella.