From the nation's capital

Been reading this site for a while and thought that I'd finally sign up as one of my friends (my roommate who I went to college with and took finance classes with) introduced me a while ago. I'm a state university finance graduate from the class of 2007, Caucasian male. I manage a bank's new Mid-Atlantic bank branches that opened in January 2012. I have been given nearly "entrepreneurial" autonomy to hire my own people, pick my own business locations and implement technology and make business decisions. I have a very low base salary and huge bonus incentives. I'm very blessed and I get to work with my closest friends every single day. Very blessed.

I'm not particularly intelligent, but I did meet the right people at the right time who were willing to put their trust in me, and I insanely took the risk. It's an amazing and challenging time to be in the banking industry (as in retail/depository banking). Compliance due to Dodd-Frank and the SAFE Act are among the biggest challenges in this business. Competition is incredibly fierce. Revenue generation is a monster task. Technologically keeping up with the competition is difficult and expensive, and hiring and HR is a complicated legal limbo. Thankfully, our bank is over 20 years old and has about 40-50 branches nationwide in 12 different states, so there has been no reinventing of the wheel--just constant improvement of the product.

Anyway, I might be chiming in from time to time on economics, banking and geopolitics since I've been forced to keep my finger on the pulse. You can't be good in this business without keeping close tabs on the world around you.