Shayna Arrington always knew she was going to work in finance. She earned an MBA with a concentration in finance from the University of Buffalo School of Management, and then earned a law degree with a concentration in financial transactions from the University of Buffalo School of Law.
During law school, Arrington spent her summers interning in Washington, D.C., for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice in their enforcement divisions.
At the DOJ, Arrington was supposed to be in its bank fraud unit, but ended up working in its mortgage fraud unit. "I fell down the rabbit hole of loan origination and mortgage compliance in 2008 at the height of the [subprime mortgage] crisis," she said.
She spent the next three-and-a-half years in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's office of lender activities and program compliance. "I thought I was going to be a government attorney for life, but my husband's in the military, and we did a series of moves so I ended up leaving government service," Arrington recalled.
She worked for two years as a compliance attorney for American Mortgage Law Group. In 2017, she joined The Money Source, a correspondent lender, as its chief compliance officer. Arrington was responsible for oversight of the privately owned company's legal and regulatory compliance, policies and procedures, licensing and examinations, and complaint management.
In 2021, TMS' owners decided to branch into traditional banking and set their sights on acquiring Allied First Bank, then a $149 million-asset bank based in Oswego, Illinois. Arrington authored the business plan and its 2,500 pages of supporting documents in the owners' bid to acquire the bank, and then had to navigate intricacies of the approval process through the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the state of Illinois.
Arrington was appointed as the new bank's chief risk officer in April 2023, and the now $753 million-asset bank was rebranded as Servbank earlier this year.
Of her accomplishments thus far in her career, Arrington is particularly proud of founding and leading a senior women's forum within the organization. Once a month, the women meet to discuss professional development but also share their experience from the lens of being a woman in the industry.
"It's been an incredible resource within our community," she said. "While we might have different roles and differ in the scope of our job duties, we still face the same struggles and the same challenges. And I think we all need a place to be able to release those sometimes."
