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n early February, Joseph Otting, the new Comptroller of the Currency, hosted a gathering of nine former comptrollers. Only one person in the room had been a career banker prior to becoming a regulator—Otting. In fact, unlike the others, Otting isn’t a law yer or an experienced bureaucrat. This has brought something of a new approach to OCC since Otting formally took office in late November 2017—a fresh set of eyes from a fresh background. “There were a lot of processes here that had been built up over many, many years,” Otting explains. “People would say, ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it.’ A nd I’d respond, ‘Well, great, but we’re going to figure out a new way to do it.’” Not change for change’s sake, but for the sake of functionality and efficiency. One shift is simple: that people stop showing up at meetings with thick binders stuffed with papers. Now tablets sit where paper used to.
Too many people signing off
Another shift is more meaningful: how OCC renders decisions. “There were certain things that maybe took four or five weeks to make a decision on,” says Otting. Now, “we make that decision in a day or two.” Otting directed a rethinking of decision processes. “A lot of stuff went to the top of the house here,” he 14
BANKING EXCHANGE
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explains. That’s been replaced with a process that delegates more items down into the agency to give people the authority to approve various matters. “I want people who interact with the agency to be able to see a quicker, faster decision-making process. I want them to say, ‘Wow, this is like dealing with somebody who is in commerce.’” Otting also shrunk the administrative cycle by trimming the number of regulators who were expected to approve a decision. “There was stuff that 20 people would sign off on that they had no ability to inf luence. I’d ask, ‘Why are 20 people signing this?’” This may sound like a businessm a n’s d i s d a i n for bu r e a uc r a t s , but Otting speaks highly of OCC staff—something one or two past comptrollers didn’t do. One goal he has for his term is to leave OCC with a solid management team with business-like attitude. “I’ve forced back on them a lot more decisions that historically they weren’t involved in,” he says. “Issues around budgets and being accountable for your unit’s financials. That’s a new skill set that people are learning around here.” This particular internal emphasis arises from Otting’s knowledge that bank assessments pay for OCC operations. “It disturbed me when I got here that the year-over-year budget increase was high single digits,” says Otting. He says he’s brought that rate of increase down and hopes to
All photos courtesy of David Hathcox
By Steve Cocheo, executive editor & digital content manager