Model Validation Director - Credit, Allowance & Compliance

At U.S. Bank, we’re on a journey to do our best. Helping the customers and businesses we serve to make better and smarter financial decisions and enabling the communities we support to grow and succeed.  We believe it takes all of us to bring our shared ambition to life, and each person is unique in their potential. A career with U.S. Bank gives you a wide, ever-growing range of opportunities to discover what makes you thrive at every stage of your career. Try new things, learn new skills and discover what you excel at—all from Day One.

Job Description

U.S. Bank is seeking an experienced Model Validation Director for our Credit, Allowance & Compliance areas and will reside within the Bank’s Risk Management and Compliance organization. The Executive Leader in this role will support the Model Risk Management program at the bank.  The overall structure is designed to promote effective governance and risk management with the goal of assessing and managing risks that may impact the company, including credit, financial, liquidity, market, operational, reputational, strategic, and other risks as appropriate.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

• Leads a highly skilled analytic team to independently review and validate a wide range of models including CCAR, allowance, compliance, and cyber security models

• Assesses model risk through pre-implementation validations, periodic validations and monitoring activities that independently challenge conceptual design/methodology, reference data, processes, and performance.

• Identifies corrective actions that promote model risk management process improvements and ensure timely remediation of the identified issues.

• Leads the team in identifying and implementing a process to conduct a diverse set of sophisticated analyses of models and for effectively managing tasks/resources to shepherd each project to its completion in a timely fashion. Validation produces reports challenging model assumptions, limitations, processes, and documentation.

• Develops and leads a team to establish and continuously enhance model validation processes involving execution of thorough testing and critical review of conceptual and performance aspects of the models through creation of alternative benchmark approaches, back testing, stress and sensitivity testing.

• Responsible for review of independently authored reports detailing results of analyses to ensure results are presented in a manner accessible to various levels of management and quantitative backgrounds.

• Interfaces with key stakeholders throughout validation process, regulators and internal audit to discuss justification and reasoning behind validation and review findings

PREFERRED SKILLS/QUALIFICATIONS:

• Master or Doctoral degree and 10+ years of relevant experience

• 6+ years of experience leading a quantitative modeling team

• Advanced degree in quantitative discipline such as: Mathematics, Statistics, Finance, Economics or related field

• Strong background in at least one statistical programming language such as SAS, Python or R.  Familiarity with VBA, SQL, or Matlab is a plus

• Strong critical thinking skills and a detail-oriented nature to challenge models developed internally and by vendors

• Strong background and practical experience working with econometric concepts such as time-series models and generalized linear regression approaches

• Demonstrated ability to draw insights from large complex datasets

• Strong background and practical experience developing and/or validating credit loss forecasting and compliance models

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills are necessary (ability to explain complex ideas in simple, non-technical language)

• Ability to build strong relations with peers, business line managers, and colleagues across the bank

• Highly motivated with ability to learn and understand various business lines and their function within the organization

• Strong leadership and organizational skills, ability to manage multiple teams and work on multiple assignments concurrently

• Experience with regulatory guidance (OCC 2011-12, Basel, CCAR, CECL, AML/BSA)

• Familiarity with vendor platforms such as: QRM, Polypaths, Yield Book, Risk Metrics, and Bloomberg

• Experience working on teams that participate in bank stress testing exercises

• In-depth knowledge of and experience with credit loss forecasting models (retail and wholesale portfolios), AML models, fair lending models, and cyber security models

• Strong understanding of various statistical, ec