Tag Archive for: federal reserve

NY Fed Offers New Insights for Financial Services Firms

There are two new resources on the Governance and Culture Reform site of the Federal Reserve Bank of NY that highlight the regulatory trends with respect to managing culture in financial services firms. 

The first is a transcript from an event at Thomson Reuters on February 7, 2018, which was a moderated discussion among Bill Dudley (President of the NY Fed), Bill Rhodes (WR Rhodes Global Advisors), and Ellen Alemany  (Chairwoman and CEO of CIT Group), moderated by Rob Cox (Reuters News).  The panelists covered a wide array of matters relating to the topic of Banking Culture:  Still room for reform?

Dudley highlighted that while some progress has been made, there’s still much room for improvement.  For example, the NY Fed has proposed a banking registry to keep track of whether employees have left their jobs for reasons of fraud or other misconduct.  This would address the so called “rolling bad apples” problem, whereby companies may inadvertently hire a rogue employee of another firm because employment law discourages employers from sharing potentially derogatory information about former employees.  He mentions that the U.K. has perhaps made more progress on this matter, having already established a similar registry.

Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry Conference

The Reforming Culture and Behavior in the Financial Services Industry Conference last week at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York* demonstrated that today’s financial industry understands the need for culture and behavior change in order to run a more ethical company. After spending many years focused on implementing compliance programs, there is now an complementary understanding of the role of ethics and its important function in shaping culture and reputation. The financial industry, however, must confront the bigger challenge of finding ways to actually change behavior.