Camille Remus
Title: Senior Vice President, Compliance and Security, Belmont Savings Bank
Age: 56
Experience: 25 years
Regulatory burden is on every banker’s mind right now, but at the end of the day, it’s people like Camille Remus who dig into the nitty-gritty of it. Remus actually got her start as a bank examiner right out of college. After cutting her teeth on the regulator’s side of the business, she pursued a career in compliance, working at big and small banks alike and somehow finding the time to earn a master’s degree in international business, too. Earlier this year, Remus was promoted to senior vice president of compliance and security at Belmont Savings Bank. She talked to Banker & Tradesman about regulations, the pace of change and compliance at a community bank.
Q: Why do you say it’s important to understand the intent behind new regulations?
A: Well, for example, all the changes that are coming from Truth in Lending, those really all go back to the mortgage crisis that we had in the past few years where unscrupulous lenders – usually not banks – made loans to individuals who didn’t qualify. These mortgage brokers might not have done a lot of due diligence on the person getting the loan, or they didn’t qualify them with a full documentation. Once people started defaulting, they said, no one told me that this was going to happen, and that’s when lawmakers stepped in.
Now, you have to give customers a disclosure that says, this is your interest rate, these are your payments, and this is how it will change over the life of the loan. It’s much clearer to someone getting a loan that this is going to be their responsibility, and they better understand the full picture. I think the problem was, it wasn’t disclosed completely and people didn’t do their due diligence up front.
The regulators are always looking at it from the point of view of the consumer and protecting the consumer, and that’s one of the key focuses of the new CFPB is to ensure that the consumers are not harmed by any products or services at the bank.
If you understand the purpose and the intent, it helps when you’re trying to explain to someone who’s actually doing it in loan operations. They understand this is what this regulation is really meant to do.
Q: When you look back over the past 20 or so years of compliance, what strikes you most about the regulatory environment?
A: During the last decade alone, the regulatory burden has multiplied more than tenfold. We saw more than 50 new rules in the two years before Dodd Frank. Now after Dodd Frank, the final regulations that have been written to date, it’s over 6,000 pages of regulations that could be new requirements for the bank.
The pace of change 10 years ago, maybe once a year you’d have one regulation change. Now in the next year, we’ll have pretty much every aspect of Truth in Lending change. It’s a complete change in a regulation, as opposed to before when they might have tweaked one little requirement. We thought that was a big deal. The pace of change is so fast that you have to be organized to be able to stay on top of it. I find if I put it on a spreadsheet, I can keep track much better.
Q: What’s the difference between compliance at a big bank and compliance at a little bank?
A: At the end of the day, the objective is the same. It’s just how you approach it. At a big bank, you have multiple people working on the same task. Here, I’m involved in a lot of the decision making in products, I understand what the new products are going to be and how we’re rolling them out, I’m much more involved here than I would have been at a big bank.
Even though you might be looking at the same regulation, it’s a totally different world. I personally find community banking is much more personal. The level of involvement with senior management and everyone here is just incredible.
I don’t like all the red tape at a big bank. If I see something and I think that we should make a change or discuss something, I can bring it up at a committee meeting with senior management, whereas at a big bank, you would have to go up the channel. Here, I have a much more direct impact on compliance.
Camille Remus’ Top Five Keys To Compliance:
- Use all your available resources: There’s a lot of guidance available from the American Bankers Association and the Massachusetts Bankers Association, and I belong to compliance networks. At a small bank you don’t have built-in resources, so you have to be creative sometimes.
- Go to training: You could read a policy and think you understand it, but when you go to training, you find out all kinds of little, specific details you can bring back to the bank. I try to find resources that offer spreadsheets.
- Work as a team: … it could be overwhelming if I stopped to think that all of this burden falls on my shoulders, but it’s really a team effort here.
- Build good relationships with your regulators: If we’re thinking of doing something or we’re not sure how it would impact us, we can always reach out to the regulators and ask their advice.
- Seek advice: I can read the regulation, but if you don’t really understand what the intent is, you might misinterpret it.
