Regional President Speech

Business Associates Club April 16, 1997 o Glad to be here - unique opportunity to meet and interact with the cream of Boston's young leaders o Want to do two things tonight - ( 1 ) Some personal perspectives on making the move from the back office to the front office - so to speak (2) Talk to you a bit about the role that FRBB is playing in the Boston and New England communities o First the personal ( 1) Worked for the Federal Reserve System 29 years this summer - 23 in New York and 6 in Boston (2) Recruited as a computer programmer, talked my way into management development program (3) Had no real background in business--had learned programming as part of Poli Sci graduate course (4) Started as a bank examiner--first had to master accounting on the job (5) Went back to school - MBA part time at NYU (6) At the same time got involved with the development and implementation of cost accounting system still used by Reserve Banks - sort of learned it at night, practiced it during the day (7) I had the responsibility of implementing that system across the country (8) From there went on to any number of operations and staff jobs at increasing levels of seniority until in 1987 I was made a senior vice president over all the high value transfer areas, Treasury Security issuance, accounting and data system risk management -- at that point I figured I'd gone about as far as I could go (9) That wasn't to be the case, however, because through the 80' s and early 90' s I was involved with crises after crises, the resolution of which brought me ever closer to developing policy and to policy makers (10) Banco do Brazil, The Bank of New York computer failure, the stock market crash, the Drexel failure, just to name a few ( 11) We in the back office learned a lot and became very valuable members of the team; policies success depended on the systems and operations to make them work and we who know how to do that were partners as never before { 12) That experience -- repeated again and again - convinced me that I wanted to be one of the policy makers { 13) That opportunity presented itself in 1991 when the Chief Operating Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston retired; I had known Dick Syron and worked with him in the early 80' s so when he called and asked me to interview for the job, I didn't hesitate ( 14) The next big step came in 1994 when Dick left to become Chairman of the American Stock Exchange. had to ask myself the question, did I want to be president? It's an entirely different job than COO--much more outwardly focused and involved with monetary policy in ways I never had been before ( 15) Surprisingly, this was a hard question to answer -- but with some help from an executive counseling firm I was able to put myself fully in the ring ( 16) Since becoming president two things have struck me it's even more an outside job than I ever expected; to make an impact/difference, a Reserve Bank has to be integral to the life of its communities { 17) FRBB continues in this tradition ( 18) Discuss 3 areas --Education --Access to lending for low and moderate income borrowers --Economic/community development Questions

Cathy E. Minehan (1997, April 15). Regional President Speech. Speeches, Federal Reserve. https://whenthefedspeaks.com/doc/regional_speeche_19970416_cathy_e_minehan

@misc{wtfs_regional_speeche_19970416_cathy_e_minehan,
  author = {Cathy E. Minehan},
  title = {Regional President Speech},
  year = {1997},
  month = {Apr},
  howpublished = {Speeches, Federal Reserve},
  url = {https://whenthefedspeaks.com/doc/regional_speeche_19970416_cathy_e_minehan},
  note = {Retrieved via When the Fed Speaks corpus}
}