Director, global risk management
Columbia Sportswear
Portland, OR
For more than 70 years, Columbia Sportswear has designed gear that allows adventurers to enjoy the great outdoors. Since 2010, Cameron Williams has been leading risk management initiatives for Columbia, working from the company’s home base in Portland and drawing on a background in corporate risk management and insurance broking. Prior to joining Columbia, Williams was an account executive for Aon Risk Insurance Services West, before which he spent 10 years at Nike, where he was responsible for managing the sportswear giant’s global risk control function, property & casualty and executive risk coverages, and insurance captive.
Williams has identified cyber-related risks as Columbia’s main concern in recent years, “like many organizations that live in the direct-to-consumer space.” To address these risks, he has had to look not only at contractual risk transfers, but also at risk mitigation with the help of the IT teams. Another major challenge for Williams is making sure that risk management and mitigation are duly integrated into Columbia’s operations outside the US, which requires his team “to understand the unique business environment at [the] country level.”
Given his extensive background in insurance, Williams values a close working relationship with underwriters, and enjoys helping them to “see beyond what they find on the application, the internet or in other public-facing information” and recognize the company’s management and internal efforts toward risk mitigation.
