RMA Inaugural Meeting Success

The newly formed Northwest Arkansas chapter of the Risk Management AssociationCosmopolitan Hotel in Fayetteville. held its first meeting on July 18. About 80 bankers attended the luncheon.

Bill Scholl, president of First Security Bancorp, spoke at the event and encouraged attendees to join the RMA and become active in it. FSB is the Searcy-based holding company that operates 17 First Security Banks in Northwest Arkansas.

Scholl believes the industry “will see a real shake out” in bank mergers and acquisitions in coming years due to lower attention paid to credit quality.

Robert Hopkins, senior branch executive of the Little Rock branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, gave a state of the union of the Fed in Arkansas. The Bank will continue to consolidate its check processing efforts, he said. And despite real estate problems, banks in Northwest Arkansas are doing all right, Hopkins said.

Larry Olson, Washington County president of Little Rock-based Metropolitan National Bank, is a chapter board member. He said the group has asked Candace Franks, the new commissioner of the Arkansas State Bank Department, to speak at its October meeting, but she hasn’t committed.

Founded in 1914 and headquartered in Philadelphia, RMA is a nonprofit association with a goal to advance the use of sound risk principles in the financial services industry.

RMA promotes an enterprise approach to risk management that focuses on credit risk, market risk, and operational risk. RMA has a membership of 3,000 financial institutions and 18,000 risk management professionals around the world.