Pam Perdue
Chief Regulatory Officer, Continuity
Age: 52
Industry experience: 30 years

Banking regulators have made more than 65 announcements since early March, keeping Pam Perdue and her regulatory operations team at Continuity busy making sense of new rules triggered by the coronavirus crisis. Perdue joined Continuity in 2011 when it merged with a fintech she founded, My Compliance Info. A regulatory financial technology firm based in New Haven, Continuity offers cloud-based platforms that provide regulatory and risk-management support to banks, credit unions, mortgage companies, fintechs and other financial services companies. During the coronavirus national emergency, Continuity is offering financial institutions free access to its federal and state platforms that update new regulations and provide analysis from Perdue’s team about what regulations mean and how to implement the next steps.

Q: How did you get involved with regulatory technology?
A: I started my career as a community banker. I began in smaller community banks. Those tended to grow and get acquired by other institutions. That led to me working with global organizations as well. I then went behind the scenes and spent some time as a Federal Reserve examiner. I really got to see what the supervisory process was like from the inside so that I could better understand what was needed to pass muster with the regulatory agencies and why they operated and thought the way that they did about certain issues. From there I was lured away to the regulatory technology space when I got added to a recruitment effort for a company called Compliance Coach. We were the first online learning management system dedicated to educating bankers and others about the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which was a big deal at the time in 1999. I have since founded a few additional financial technology firms. Continuity is my fourth regtech venture. I love it. I don’t want to say, “I hope it will be my last,” because I’ve got a lot of adventure left in me. But I’m very happy here as one of the veterans on the team and really thrilled with what we’re able to do to help people.

Q: When did you realize that banks and credit unions were going to need help with this crisis?
A: We were all sitting on the edge of our chairs until the national emergency was declared. We knew that things looked different. We knew that something was not going to be quite the same, but I don’t think that we understood the extent of it at that point. There certainly was still quite a bit of confusion at federal and state levels about the depth of the health crisis and what that might mean to the economic picture. But I think that in earnest, when the national emergency was declared and we saw the CARES Act, we knew this is going to be history repeating itself from a regulatory perspective.

We have always been data-minded and data-driven as a technology company, so we were able to go back and look at almost 40 years’ worth of data, back to 1985 when the [Savings & Loan] crisis happened. When we looked at when crises happened, what follows shortly after is a spate of new regulation. We have a pretty strong belief in our forecast that the pandemic will also trigger a lot of regulation due to the economic aftermath, not just on financial services but across the economy.

Q: What future regulations might come out of this pandemic?
A: We know that regardless of everyone’s best efforts to minimize these pandemic impacts, they have exposed a lot of weaknesses in the broader global and national economies. They have exposed weaknesses in our reliance – or lack thereof – on technology. There have been opportunities for bad actors to maliciously engage – whether that’s in fraud or whether it’s something like hacking into systems that are not as secure as they would be under normal conditions. I do expect that we will see in the financial services space additional regulation as well as existing guidance renewed on cybersecurity.

I think that there’s no doubt that we’re going to see a lot of shift in safety and soundness requirements for banks and credit unions: how they’re going to treat capital not just on this immediate basis. They’ve given some relief to dip into capital buffers to help customers and members right now, but if the crisis lingers for a particular period, those capital buffers may get depleted beyond levels we were expecting. If that’s case, regulators will have to mount some type of response to those different capital standards.

And then on the consumer protection side, I think it remains to be seen. We probably won’t see that until sometime next year when the aftermath of the pandemic starts to be better known.

Q: What might happen with fintechs and mortgage companies?
A: I think that for the fintechs, there’s already a proposed rule that came out on March 31 to get the FDIC involved in approving certain activities of industrial banks and industrial loan companies, which are often the kinds of charters that fintechs go after. I think we’ll see renewed efforts to oversee that space in some more meaningful way, even though they aren’t banks.

There have also been a lot of mortgage companies inundated with refinance requests either from people who aren’t certain about their continued income-earning capability or have decided to refinance now while the rates are as low as they’ve been in decades. That’s putting a different kind of good pressure from a customer point of view – we’re getting the business – but rates are so low that assets are now repricing at lower rates. So, it’s going to be hard to tell how that domino effect will really play out in the consumer protection space. It is definitely watch and wait and try to respond when it happens.

Q: What else might happen with regulation?
A: One note of optimism – despite the fact that we’re going to go through some unpleasant times economically and we’re going to go through different regulatory cycles as a result of this pandemic, I do think that I’ve seen a type of banding together and collaboration and spirit of cooperation despite any political turmoil that, unfortunately, might be a big part of our society these days. At the end of the day, there are still people who are willing to help other people, and that is going to allow the financial services industry to make some great strides and help lead the way forward for people. It certainly has diminished some of the rancor and competitiveness that have run a little unchecked over the past few decades.

Perdue’s Five Favorite Stay-at-Home Guilty Pleasures

1. Going barefoot all day, every day.
2. Posting to social media photos of springtime critters.
3. Browsing BuzzFeed and TMZ articles for a “brain break.”
4. Smashing vanilla ice cream between two almonette cookies.
5. Taking fantasy weekend trips (and planning future travel!) by watching travel documentaries.