re: Career in banking

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Thread hijack:

NHTIGER, what is your take on the prospects of landing a bank examiner job with a law degree? It seems like a lot of work examiners do is compliance related, I could see a law degree being useful. Thoughts?

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Excellent, actually.

I was in the FDIC's first wave of Consumer Compliance Specialists in 1978, and each Field Office had one. Bank examinations for compliance were one-person events conducted separately from "safety and soundness" examinations, usually done by a crew of 3 to 5 examiners. It was as a result of citing a bank in Winter Haven, FL, as being seriously deficient in areas of compliance and having them put on a troubled banks list that I received an offer from that bank to become their Compliance Officer.

Banks at that time were merging or being acquired at breakneck speed, and over the next few years I moved up via that merger/acquisition route to become the Corporate Compliance Officer for NCNB National Bank (later known as NationsBank, which merged with BankAmerica), based in Tampa.

That position had me working 15 hours a week with attorneys from Florida's largest law firm (Holland & Knight), which at one time during that period shared a building with NCNB downtown. One of those was Bill McBride, later to be the husband of Alex Sink, an NCNB V-P, who was the Dem. candidate for Governor of Florida in 2010. Bill had run for Governor several years earlier and lost as well. He passed away very recently.

The Corporate Compliance position also had me present at Board meetings run by Hugh McColl and occasionally Ken Lewis, and instructing at numerous training seminars throughout the state of Florida.

My undergrad and graduate degrees were in business, but I had a firm grasp of legal principles as they applied to commercial/retail banking.

Going forward, were I soliciting people for careers in bank supervision, I would start with those holding law degrees.

eta to change "High McColl" to "Hugh McColl".