Manufacturers Bank hired Michael Leary as executive vice president and chief risk officer, reporting to Kazuhisa Miyagawa, chairman and CEO of the bank, and functionally to the bank’s board of directors and to Kim Olson, chief risk officer of the Americas division of SMBC, Manufacturers Bank’s parent company.
Leary, a chartered financial analyst, will be responsible for the overall direction and control of risk exposure for the bank and will provide leadership and strategic direction regarding its risk framework, including oversight of both financial and non-financial risk. He will also be a member of Manufacturers Bank’s management committee.
Leary is a banking professional with more than 30 years of experience in risk management, regulatory oversight, consumer relations, commercial banking and treasury operations. He also holds three patents related to banking technology.
“We are excited to welcome Michael, with his extensive risk management background, to build a strong and robust risk management program,” Miyagawa said.
“We are fortunate to bring Michael on board at this important juncture as we continue to build our U.S. operations,” Olson said. “Michael has significant retail banking risk management and banking technology experience, which will allow him to deepen our risk management framework and oversight and position us for disciplined growth.”
Prior to joining Manufacturers Bank, Leary served as the senior vice president of payments risk and collections infrastructure at U.S. Bank, where he led cross-functional teams to implement risk and fraud management tools for payments, lending and deposit products. Prior to that, as senior vice president and risk strategies execution executive at Bank of America, Leary architected the bank’s model analytics platform for consumer and small business risk management and revenue reporting and implemented the bank’s first relationship-data-driven underwriting strategy. He also worked as a supervising examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
