Through transition, ABA keeps working to serve bankers

Northwestern Financial Review, Jul 15-Jul 31, 2005

Q: Tell us a little about the transition into y our new role at the American Bankers Association.

It's been very smooth. A lot of the credit for that goes to our leadership. A number of years ago, they set it up so I would at least have the opportunity to advance. The main thing I have to do is watch my time very carefully to make sure I am devoting time in the right areas. I'm obviously not doing as much in government relations as I did before. We have Floyd Stoner, who had been in the legislative side for many years, and I had been delegating more and more to him over the last three or four years. And then bringing in Wayne Abernathy from the U.S. Treasury Department was a big help. He had the perfect combination of skills and history to come in.

Was it hard to let go of government relations?

Part of my skill in G.R. had been strategy. Obviously if you are in G.R. you have to have people skills, you have to know how to develop consensus and how to talk to people. My bias is toward working with people and strategy, and a lot of that transfers well overall in running the ABA. I spend an awful lot of time now talking to members, working with bankers, and I enjoy that.

Do you have ideas you would like to implement in ABAs various departments?

We have a strategy we have been working on for several years. We are trying to do a lot more where we provide services to save bankers time and money. And we provide them deep down into the bank. Banking has gotten so much more complicated and that has proven to be an opportunity for us to serve. Compliance would be the simplest example.

We are really focusing on two things. One is through the use of technology and e-mail, we are working on getting very timely information to the people in the bank who need it. We have about 25 e-mail bulletins, and they vary with respect to how many people get them. We have over 80,000 subscribers. There is some double counting, but we will be over 100,000 by the end of the year. So instead of that paper going to the CEO and maybe one or two other people, it is not unusual for a community bank to have 25 or 30 people getting this information.

The other side is doing what we call Tool Boxes or ABA Works. Tool Boxes are the bigger ones; ABA Works are the smaller ones. Where we can do something once and do it really well, maybe run it by the regulators, and then give it to each of our members rather than each of them having to figure it out. The simplest example was the privacy notices, where we basically laid out one, two, three, four, how to put together your privacy notice. They can use our tool kit and get it right.

The industry is changing rapidly. Do y ou buy the barbell theory about how the industry will look in a few years?

I don't know. Twenty years ago we thought that and it really hasn't quite worked that way. I think what is clear is there is going to continue to be consolidation at the big end. It's also clear we are going to have some big international players; they have a lot of capital to invest here, like HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Canadian banks.

7s it more contentious in Congress than ever? What does this mean for how you get things done ?

It's a lot different than it was 25 years ago; it is marginally different than it has been over the last 12 years. Where it really manifested itself is in the Senate. It is good for you if you are playing defense; it can be bad if you are trying to get a bill enacted. We are very fortunate this year that before the partisanship really started to be prevalent, before the window started getting tighter and tighter, two bills that we really wanted passed: legal reform and bankruptcy reform. If we were to take those bills up in September, I have serious doubts they would have been enacted. We have to act a little differently than some industries because we have so many issues. If you are the NRA, you basically have one issue, and they are either for you or against you. We have to be constantly developing coalitions with majorities or in some cases supermajorities. We have to try to work our way through the partisanship and try to work with as many players as we can.