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Last year regulators tightened their grip on Wall Street, while banks were caught off guard by emerging cybersecurity and reputational risks.
January 5 -
The growing influence of two directors known for seeking big changes at other banks has raised questions about whether Naugatuck Valley Financial in Connecticut may be put up for sale.
November 26 -
Joseph Stilwell has reached a truce with another banking company.
March 17
Naugatuck Valley Savings and Loan decided it was time to overhaul its enterprise risk management after seeing inefficiencies, regulatory oversight and wasted man hours mount.
A team of more than 50 employees at the $491 million-asset company spent last year implementing
Previously, the bank used spreadsheets on a shared drive to outline and rate risk management practices, a process that was time-consuming and inefficient, said James Cotter, the company's chief operating officer. The spreadsheets were not integrated with each other, so often work had to be repeated.
So far, Naugatuck has saved roughly 100 to 150 man hours with the upgrade, Cotter estimates.
"We recognized that regulators were more focused on risk management and we realized that we had inefficiencies in this area," Cotter said. "We were able to kill two birds with one stone."
It was challenging to get everyone to commit the time required to complete the project but it had the support of senior management so "the message was delivered strongly that we needed to get this done," Cotter said. Naugatuck was able to complete the entire integration in a year and implement more than 700 risk assessments.
But all of the effort and resources dedicated to the project were worth it in the end, said Rita Myers, a senior operations officer at Naugatuck.
"When we actually saw this beautiful final report and how all of these risk assessments tied into each other, it was a nice moment," she added. "Everyone took a deep breath."
