DS News - U.S. Bank

60 strategic goals. Developing the framework and supporting processes, ensuring that we are protecting existing assets, enabling future growth objectives, and helping the company move forward by setting the guardrails in place to allow us to do it in a balanced and protected manner. WHAT SORT OF EXTRA REGULATORY CONCERNS DO YOU HAVE TO CONSIDER AS BELL BANK APPROACHES THE $10 BILLION ASSET THRESHOLD? With $10 billion comes a lot of interesting challenges, many of which are attached to bank's growth. e bigger you get, the more diverse you get geographically and via your product set, which changes the risk profile of the bank operationally in terms of compliance and in what you need to be prepared to address. So, the risk program that we're putting into place is designed to make sure that we can counter and manage any additional risk that we encounter as we get bigger. From a regulatory perspective, the big thing that you have at that point is you come under CFPB supervision. is is a different world of bank regulation: what they're looking at, the depth in which they're going to look at how you're handling things, your compliance with these consumer protection regulations, how you're handling business processes, how you're interacting with your customers. Bell Bank is a very customer- focused institution. We're preparing by benchmarking ourselves against industry- best practices and against what the CFPB has published—both in terms of their examination manual and quarterly supervisory highlights. We want to make sure that we're putting a program in place that is in line with those expectations. Not necessarily just to address that, because the CFPB is going to want it, but also because it's in our customers' best interest. WHEN YOU JOINED BELL, YOU SAID YOU HOPED THAT YOUR "MIDWESTERN ROOTS" WOULD INFORM SOME OF THE CHANGES YOU WANTED TO BRING TO BELL'S RISK MANAGEMENT PROGRAM. COULD YOU EXPAND ON THAT? When I started having conversations with Bell, one of the big attractions was the culture. Everything that we do is in line with our bottom line, which is "happy employees, happy customers." I look at risk management as a direct corollary in terms of supporting that mission. It's a tenet in everything that we do: treating each other as family, protecting our customers, serving the needs of our communities, and how we set up a program that can advance those goals as we continue to move forward. at starts with the tone at the top, with our board and our CEO and what they've pushed from a culture perspective. at will continue from a risk management culture as we support that going forward. As we talk about the culture, that was the attraction of what brought me here, but you then ask, how does the program expand and grow to support that? And I don't look at it necessarily from a program expansion standpoint, although it will do that. As we get more complex, you'll have more specialists and more disciplines just to manage that related risk, but it comes more to risk maturity, to having risk embedded as a strategic enabler with this seat at the table. Allowing us to have this real-time risk assessment, so we understand, we're preparing for, and we're controlling against these risks before we go to market with any new product or service— in the best interest of our customers, our employees, and our community. FROM A RISK AND REGULATORY STANDPOINT, CAN YOU DISCUSS SOME OF THE TOP AREAS OF FOCUS IN 2021? When you're talking about the mortgage space, it's tough to focus on just a few "Everything that we do is in line with our bottom line, which is 'happy employees, happy customers.'" Cover Story By: David Wharton

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