Keeping Deposits Home

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

This Month in Banking is presented by Wolf & Company.

Building on a long tradition of serving financial institutions, we offer expertise designed to enhance risk management, performance, and long-term planning. Let's get started.

Ben Crowley (0:21)

Hello, this is Ben Crowley, Managing Director of Strategic Consulting Services at Wolf & Company. I'd like to welcome you to the September 2026 episode of This Month in Banking brought to you by Wolf & Company.

Our topic on this episode is keeping deposits at home. Our guest is Kathy Kraninger, Interim Chair of BankChain Alliance, and President and CEO of the Florida Bankers Association, and former Director at the CFPB. My colleague, Emmett Shipman, working with our FinTech Practice Lead on FinTech Strategic and Growth Initiatives at Wolf & Company, is my co-host today. Welcome, Kathy. Thank you for joining us.

Kathy Kraninger (1:02)

Thank you so much, Ben. Fantastic to be with you today and looking forward to the conversation.

Ben Crowley (1:07)

Well, we're excited to dig in with you. It is our pleasure to have somebody who is on the front lines of helping community banks, and we're looking forward to hearing your story. But before you tell us about the BankChain Alliance, we want to know a little bit about Kathy. We have a sort of an inside joke, and we spent a lot of time in boardrooms and teaching a lot of bankers.

Whenever I ask the question, who went to school for banking in the room? It's almost entirely never anyone. I mean, it's maybe literally 2% of the population raises their hand and said, I went to school for banking and I've been devoted career in this industry since the beginning.

We use the term accidental bankers. Almost all of us have been in some other industry and found our way to banking. Same with Emmett, same with myself, same with Will, who's a producer on the call, and the same with you. And we want to hear your story of how you became an accidental banker or an accidental helper of the bank.

Emmett Shipman (2:10)

Bank enthusiast. Yeah, exactly.

Ben Crowley (2:12)

Yes.

Kathy Kraninger (2:15)

It is a fun story and I appreciate you starting with that because it also of course takes you to the path of how I got to be where I am today with the BankChain Alliance. But I would say first and foremost, I'm a pretty mission driven person. I was incredibly lucky to have a truly rewarding career in the federal government for more than 20 years. I was in Washington DC and working on all kinds of things. I guess I would say first and foremost, I started after working on President George W. Bush's campaign at the Department of Transportation and was there on September 11th. That really changed the trajectory of my career and what I worked on. I spent half of the time in Washington on homeland security issues, writ large. It's also the first time I engaged with the banking industry. Because protection of critical infrastructure, response to and resilience to disasters and all kinds of issues, terrorism, and certainly cash terrorism, risk insurance. The banks, where the first conversations I had with the banks was probably on that topic.

Very broad mission in homeland security and did have me engage in certainly financial crime enforcement too. A lot of things that are happening cross border that involved the interest in the financial services industry. So that was really where I started engaging with banking. And then in 2017, I got to the Office of Management and Budget, where I had an incredibly broad portfolio.

Really fun mission that OMB has, which has really taken the entire government and whittling that down to 400 people who are thinking about budget management and regulation. So how do you make effective government? So it was a very, again, another rewarding piece of my career, but that brought me more directly into housing issues, housing finance issues, all the independent agencies. And then I had the honor of being nominated to direct the CFPB. So I served as director of CFPB 2018 to 2021

And after that and after the Sela Law case was determined by the Supreme Court, I can't say that there is a more significant position in the government when you did not report to anyone. And I am glad that the court decided that the position reports to the president. But it's still hard to find something after that. I have a place to go. So I really was not looking in government at that point. I worked in the private sector and wanted to learn how you start a business. How does that work? And one of the most cutting edge places where that was happening in financial services was the digital assets industry. So I landed at Solidus Labs, which was a and still is, I should say, is a compliance company in that space. And I traveled the world talking to global regulators about how to regulate the digital asset marketplace and learn the time. I had actually a lot of great peers who are still very much in that industry.