After the financial crisis, regulators put rules in place for large banks and financial institutions to create a board committee dedicated solely to enterprise risk, rather than continuing to fold this function into the audit committee.

Now, in the midst of a new kind of crisis, boards across industries are considering risk oversight duties, and some could be weighing whether a stand-alone committee is the appropriate option.

Many boards, not just in the financial sector, have added stand-alone risk committees over the past decade. This is true within both the S&P 500 and the Russell 3000. According to Spencer Stuart, 13% of S&P 500 boards now have a risk committee, up from 4% in 2010. Of the 62 boards that had a risk committee in 2020, 42 of those were financial services companies. “On many other boards, the audit committee oversees the risk management functions,” the 2020 Spencer Stuart Board Index states.

And in the Russell 3000, 11% had stand-alone risk committees in 2020, up from 6% a decade ago, according to data from MyLogIQ, a provide of public company intelligence.