Chief risk officer, AIG
Age: 34
Industry: Finance
The financial crisis proved that AIG had no clothes -- or at least no controls. Now it's up to Sankaran, a Canadian math hotshot (his degree from the University of Waterloo was in actuarial sciences) and former partner at consultancy Oliver Wyman, to make sure it doesn't happen again. Sankaran declined AIG at first; today, as chief risk officer, he oversees the billions flowing among disparate insurance operations and reports to CEO Robert Benmosche if something suspicious rears its head.
NEXT: Sergey Brin
