Welcome back to our Compliance Superhero Series! Every month, we highlight a compliance professional who is doing excellent work and ask them about their background, their thoughts on the industry, and any hidden superpowers they have. I’ve reached out to Marvel about adding them to the next phase of the MCU, but in the meantime, you can get to know them here. This month, we’re highlighting Jeanne Kelley-Rosengren, a Project Administrator at Bell Bank. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Welcome! Tell me a little bit about yourself and your role at Bell Bank.
Hello! I work on the marketing for our mortgage team, and serve as a sort of liaison between the marketing side and the operational side.
What was your path to the compliance space?
I actually came from a retail background. Some regular, some nonprofit for about 25 years, and a lot of what I had to do was risk management with employees. That experience transferred over to Bell, where I started as a temp about 8 years ago. I eventually moved to a lead front desk role where I was helping with marketing, and two and a half years ago, I moved to marketing full time.
What compels you about the work you do?
I like yeses and nos, and making sure that we’re protecting our company. Coming from a nonprofit background, risk was always a huge piece for us. It wasn’t always just the risk to our independent business, but also to the larger agency and the mission we were serving.
Some of the details are different at a bank, but it’s the same idea: being thoughtful about protecting the business, and making sure that there’s alignment so that we can successfully serve the people that count on us.
What’s your biggest piece of advice for a successful compliance program?
I think it’s listening. Analyzing, taking a second to listen to all the people involved, is so important, whether it’s the designer, or the loan officers, or whoever we might be supporting in that moment. There’s often legal room to get the different sides what they need, and it might be as simple as changing a word or a phrasing, but you’ll never get there unless you hear from all sides.
I’m never a no person. My goal is to find the win for everybody, and to do that, you have to be open to hearing from them.
What tools–software or otherwise–are most important for your work?
We’re just really starting to integrate PerformLine into our everyday routine. The social piece has been really easy–the rules would come up quickly, and it allows me to monitor individual word choices without having to manually check.
Right now, we’re starting the rollout of our PerformLine-Jira integration, which will allow us to use the platform right where our team lives.
What do you see happening within the compliance space in the next 1-2 years?
So, Mortgages is a tricky industry. Things are changing, regulations are changing, so we have to constantly be on top of it. I’ll liken this back to when I was in retail–I always told my system managers, my supervisors that they have to be stewards of their business. They need to understand the information coming and be able to replicate that to customers.
So I’m constantly educating myself. I’m listening to news articles. I’m watching things. I’m attending roundtables, whatever I can do to suck up more information.
What’s your secret superpower?
Listening with an empathetic ear, regardless of the age or background of the person I’m talking to, and then being able to find patterns in what I learn. Everybody comes to the table with something different to offer, and if you can’t recognize that, you’re not doing a good service to them.
