Ex-Trump Adviser Cohn Predicts Bleak Future for Community Banks
Former Trump administration economic adviser Gary Cohn anticipates more banking industry consolidation as smaller institutions struggle to keep up with technological innovations that are altering the financial services landscape.
Cohn, the former President and COO of Goldman Sachs, currently heads Starling’s Risk & Governance Advisory Board.
“You’re now starting to see more and more technological competition from an unregulated community,” he said, speaking about fintech companies. “That’s forcing the banks to become more technologically savvy themselves.”
Banks have to start changing the way they manage risk, Cohn argued. Referencing recent misconduct scandals that have featured in the headlines in just the last weeks, Cohn said, “Banks “tend to look at data and look at records after the fact, either when they get client complaints or a regulator calls them, or someone says something … happened in the past. That’s not the way that I think banks are going to have to look and run their compliance department in the future.”
Instead, Cohn added, banks will need to either buy, create or invest in a technology that “allows you to monitor your workforce real-time on how they’re behaving.”
