- WIB PH
Sandie O'Connor role managing JPMorgan Chase's relationships with regulators has taken on new significance, given the company's involvement in dustups on assorted regulatory fronts, but the drama hasn't prevented O'Connor from addressing more workaday concerns.
September 18
Sandie O'Connor
Chief Regulatory Affairs Officer, JPMorgan Chase
Wherever there's trouble at JPMorgan Chase, Sandie O'Connor is likely to follow.
She led the Prime Services unit as it absorbed the failed Bear Stearns. Her appointment as treasurer in March 2012 came in the wake of the "London Whale" trading loss, and she became the chief regulatory affairs officer in April 2014 amid a Justice Department investigation into the suspected rigging of the $500 billion-a-day foreign exchange market. In the end, JPMorgan and five other banking companies pled guilty to felony conspiracy, paying a total of $2.5 billion in fines. JPMorgan's penalty was $500 million.
These days O'Connor is working to prevent future calamities. She warned during a spring forum at the Brookings Institution that some collateral standards are needed to avoid trouble with central counterparty clearinghouses. "We haven't closed down what could be the beginning of building systemic risk," she said at the forum.
She was the lead author of a paper on that topic from JPMorgan Chase last fall. It argued that more has to be done to prepare for the potential failure of such counterparties — "the most systemically important of any systemically important financial institution," the paper says.
O'Connor also is on the board and executive committee at two major trade groups: the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and the Global Financial Markets Association.
