I’ve spent a career in the gap between “the rule says” and “okay, but what do we actually do?”

I did not set out to make people laugh about compliance.

I started on the regulatory side, examining financial institutions for the FDIC. Then I crossed the table and eventually ran compliance and operations for a bank, as chief compliance officer and chief operating officer. I've consulted. I've taught. Today I'm Director of Compliance Operations at Kadince, and I've been on the faculty of the ABA Bank Marketing School since 2018.

Somewhere in all that, a pattern got hard to ignore. The hardest compliance problems were almost never hard because nobody could find the rule. They were hard because people had to apply it. Marketing had a goal. Compliance had a concern. Operations had a process. Leadership wanted an answer. The examiner wanted the story. And every one of them was using slightly different words for the same thing.

That's the job now, onstage and off. Make that conversation better. Sometimes that's a framework. Sometimes it's a story. Sometimes it's saying "it depends" and then actually explaining what it depends on. Occasionally it's a joke before the next slide, because the next slide is about UDAAP and somebody has to.