The Challenging Environment You’re Facing

Yesterday, we held the first session of our six-part webinar series on Compliance Management.  We discussed the challenging environment you’re facing, how to meet that challenge, as well as, the role of the Board of Directors and Management.  We have a lot more to cover and it’s not too late to join us!

The remaining hour-long sessions will be held August 6, 13, 20, 27 & September 3 at 11:00 a.m. CST.  Each session is recorded so if you missed the first session, it’s easy to go back, watch it and get right back up to speed.  You can also play the recording for other members of your Team and Board who you feel might benefit.

Here’s a little feedback we received from session 1:

Very useful! I was on the fence about whether I should attend, as I feel that upper management is already very supportive of the compliance department. This training brought to light some ideas about the exam and the reflection on us based on the rating as well as additional communication that could/should happen between me and the board/charter president.

Great info to share w/Board!

It was on an understandable level, not all legal jargon.

Very useful. Will be passing along to the Board for their review.

Transcript:

Rule Number one, it’s a challenging environment. In fact, I don’t have COVID up here on the screen right now, but you can see here that there’s been some HMDA changes. There’s been deregulation, that if you’re a HMDA bank, some of you might’ve had to start doing HMDA for the first time and then there was the small filer stuff that came out. Then the thresholds changed, and then July 1st, and now maybe you’re back out of HMDA. Oh my gosh, they really seemed to mess that one up.

TRID, how many times have we had different TRID changes and Q&As, and different things, and it’s evolved. In fact, we’re coming up on the fifth anniversary of the TRID, gee, happy birthday for that. Bank Secrecy Act, an always evolving thing. Now I specifically put on here like the customer due diligence beneficial owner, but the problem with Bank Secrecy Act I often hear is, “If you just tell me what I need to do, I’ll do it.” But regulators keep changing the rules.

Yes, that’s true. And what I want to say to that is, here’s why that happens. There’s always new ways to lie, cheat and steal and move money around. And the bad guys, they’re always coming up with new ways to do that. The bad news is that we’re one step behind them, all the time. The good news is, that we’re only one step behind them, but they’re coming up with new ways to lie, cheat, steal, move money. And so we’re constantly having to do with beneficial owner, cuts for due diligence requirements, the BSA requirements are always evolving.

Flood insurance. There’s some new proposed Q&As that just came out. That’s why I have that on there. Fair lending, always a hot topic. Now I know that we’ve got several directors that are listening in, and I hope that if your directors aren’t with you today, that you’ll be able to play some of this because this first segment is really going to be directed towards senior management and the board of directors.

This is a challenging environment and it’s tough for compliance officers, especially the smaller institutions that may not even have a full time compliance officer, or maybe just by themselves. In fact, just this morning, I was chatting with numerous compliance officers in an online group about the isolation, if you will, being on your own and how it’s difficult. Now this graphic that I’m putting up on your screen right now, I want you to see that this is quite outdated. Look at the very bottom, it says 2017, I crossed that out I updated with June of ’18. That’s still a couple of years ago. This is from the American Bankers’ Association. They had a website where they’ve now stopped trying to keep track of this, but here’s the details. So I want you to write this down. As of June 22nd ’18, this is from the Dodd-Frank Act only. Just the Dodd-Frank Act, right?

The one that created the CAPB, gave us TRID, gave us some other things, that there were 11,000 plus pages of proposals and final regs and guidance, almost 16,000 pages. Now again, that’s over two years ago. For a total of nearly 55 plus reams of paper, that if you’re trying to read through these things, that’s how much you’ve had to read. And gosh, so 2012, Dodd-Frank Act 2018, in that six years, about 28,000 pages came out where most compliance officers are trying to read through that, analyze that, determine what applies, what we got to do different, et cetera. Think about the HMDA, think about TRID. Now, that does not include things like the Fair Credit Reporting Act, because that comes from the Federal Trade Commission. That doesn’t include flood insurance because that comes from FEMA or there might be FFIC things, but they’re not from the Dodd-Frank Act.

So I’m trying to get you to understand that this is just the Dodd-Frank Act, and then you have other things. How about state laws? How about treasury department, Bank Secrecy Act things, and depending on what hat you wear. But the point is, never in my career, have I seen such a crush of information that has come out and the volume of information. Now we’ve had some different presidents and we’ve had some differences in the executive committee. With Trump, there’s been some down change if you will, or deregulation, but that’s still changes that you have to process. And here in a few months, we’re going to see another election and who knows what’s going to happen. But this pendulum of regulations in the sense, it only seems like it’s just swinging greater and greater and greater all the time, where in Trump’s administration we’ve had less, there’s still more than what we’ve seen maybe 20 years ago.

Published
2020/08/04