Welcome to RIMScast. Your host is Justin Smulison, Business Content Manager at RIMS, the Risk and Insurance Management Society.   Today’s guest is Eleni Willis. The Senior Vice President and Director of Enterprise Risk Management, Eleni Willis leads the design and implementation of Sterling Bank and Trust’s Enterprise Risk Management program. An early adopter of technology to support her GRC strategy, Eleni and her team apply common ERM methods and approaches to manage risk across all first and second lines of business. In this interview, Eleni and Justin discuss the roles of ERM in preventing a crisis such as the bank run on SVB, how her background as a bank examiner informs how she presents to the board on risk, and what will change for the future of ERM in banks in the light of SVB’s closure.   Key Takeaways: [:01] About RIMScast. [:28] Today’s guest is Eleni Willis, the Enterprise Risk Manager at Sterling Bank. [:35] All about upcoming RIMS webinars, workshops, events, and more! [1:17] About RIMS-CRMP. [1:30] About RIMS-CRMP-FED. [2:05] Announcement of the Spencer Educational Foundation and Spencer’s Course Development grant awarded to Temple University in March 2023. [2:42] About RISKWORLD 2023 with closing keynote speaker Danica Patrick! [3:19] About today’s episode with Eleni Willis, the ERM Director at Sterling Bank and Trust. [3:53] Justin welcomes Eleni Willis to RIMScast! [4:09] Eleni is the Director of Enterprise Risk Management with Sterling Bank and Trust, a small, community-sized bank based in Michigan, primarily doing banking in California. [4:26] Eleni has been in risk management for 20 years, starting as a bank examiner for the state of Washington during the Great Recession. [4:52] After regulation, Eleni moved to the banking world. Since then, her career has been a mix between accounting, tax, and risk management. [5:05] For the last six years, Eleni has been tasked with building ERM programs at different financial institutions and offering risk management consulting and advice within the organizations to move the risk posture forward within the institutions. [5:38] Justin became aware of Eleni when she was a webinar panelist from Sterling. Justin was a customer of Sterling and thought it would be good to have Eleni on the show. [6:40] Eleni’s ERM philosophy is there is no replacement for traditional risk management practices: conservative credit administration, liquidity stress-testing, and diversification across the balance sheet. [7:27] About Eleni’s team at Sterling. As a small team, they wear a lot of hats, including overseeing the GRC platform with Resolver, a big program they are wrapping up shortly. [8:15] It’s been a long process because of the volume of risk disciplines they are putting into the system, across the second and third lines of defense. Internal audit also utilizes the system. Eleni tells how Sterling’s first line is starting to use the GRC platform. [8:54] The GRC platform has replaced three other systems so far, saving a lot of money. [9:08] It’s been a lot of work but the tone of the top has been to implement a robust risk management program, which has been a strategic initiative for the last couple of years. [10:01] Justin and Eleni discuss the SVB collapse in terms of risk reduction. First Citizen has brought most of the assets of SVB. Bank leaders want to make sure they are prepared and that they have business continuity planning. [11:02] Social media fueled the bank run at SVB. Sterling is asking how susceptible are they to a run. How can the bank mitigate widespread misinformation? Do the Instant Response Plans incorporate this kind of scenario? [12:04] Eleni foresees regulatory investigation into banks to avoid repeating such a run. Eleni explains why so many accounts exceeded the $250K ceiling that the FDIC guarantees. SVB’s asset/liability mix should have been a warning. [13:26] Sterling has been asking themselves what their liquidity function looks like. Do they have a solid