In the Loop Episode 0 | Meet Our Hosts, Derek and Kareeme

How about this? What challenges have you encountered in balancing your responsibilities as an examiner? What kind of challenges have come up over the years, and how do you balance those kind of things?

So I'm currently no longer an examiner, but when I was, I was an examiner for 10 years.

And I think the balancing aspect was really time, right? Time management, that's an important factor to be a really good examiner.

but also taking the time to really learn and understand the regulations and knowing how to apply it.

So making sure that I kept abreast of what the regulations were, taking my time to truly understand and get a better understanding of our licensees.

So that I could, in the end, when I was communicating the findings to them, I'd look at it as a coaching opportunity, right? Because to me, I walked into this role as using it as an opportunity to partner with our industry folks, counterparts, and to be able to coach them and give them an opportunity to improve upon any deficiencies that we maybe have identified.

And in doing so, you needed to have a better understanding of the organization and what it is that they do and how they run their business.

so that you could best give them recommendations on how to improve upon any areas, but also applaud them for any areas and things that they were doing well.

So some of the challenges with balancing was just making sure that I fully understood, taking the time to fully understand what was going on with the organization so that you could provide them with the best guidance based on the information that was presented before me.

For sure.

And I think we need to follow up with that here in just a second on how do you stay up to date? I think that's one of those things that was a challenge for me.

But real quick, the ever-changing environment, the regulatory environment, that was the biggest challenge for me.

It's like every day there was something new, a new law, a new product, a new industry coming out.

You've got AI, you've got technology, just different state laws and regulations and All of that stuff was just so hard.

I mean, it is every single day.

You're going to you have to learn something.

You have to get out there and study it.

You got to talk to your other regulators and even the industry.

And so and that's kind of one of that kind of that follow up question.

Like how how do you stay up to date on all of this stuff? What what are your, you know, tricks and tips that you have that that keeps you up to date on all of this kind of stuff?

Great question.

So different trainings, you know, within my agency, North Carolina Commission of Banks, we would have regular meetings, regular team meetings.

And that was an opportunity for us to cross train, but also to share in our different exam findings so that we each had an opportunity to learn about these different things that maybe have come up that maybe I didn't experience or someone else hadn't.

And that presented an opportunity for us to be able to learn and grow from those different situations so that if it occurred within one of our exams, we could apply or use what was gained or learned from those other exams and try to apply it in the current exam that we were working on.

And so sharing of that knowledge, not only with, you know, amongst yourself within your own agency, but when you have the opportunity when you're working on like multi-states exams or OCOEs is the new name, But sharing that knowledge amongst state regulators was so critically important because that's all you have.