Starling, a pioneering risk governance and supervisory solutions provider, announced today the appointment of former Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Bill Dudley, and former ECB Supervisory Board Member Elizabeth McCaul, to its Industry & Regulatory Advisory Board.
Elizabeth McCaul is a past Member of the Supervisory Board of the European Central Bank – the first American to serve in such capacity. McCaul’s ECB mandate included supervisory strategy, assuring the quality and consistency of supervisory practice, internal governance, and training, and prudential impacts on financial stability stemming from private credit markets, capital markets, and geopolitical risk. She also served as Chair of the Board Steering Committee on the Digital Agenda, overseeing operational resiliency, IT risk, crypto, cyber-security, FinTech entrants, and the development and implementation of the ECB’s SupTech strategy. Prior to joining the ECB, McCaul held senior leadership roles with Promontory Financial Group, she served as New York Superintendent of Banks, she was elected Chair of the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, and she spent a decade as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.
"Culture is not a 'soft' concern,” McCaul insisted. “To the contrary, it is foundational to the resilience of any financial institution, and a central factor in every serious failure we have seen," she said. "Time after time, lapses in governance, blind spots in decision-making, and normalized corner-cutting have manifested as very real financial costs, often triggering crises of confidence,” McCaul observed. “Supervisors and firms both need to move away from the 'detect-and-correct' posture that allows this to continue. Trust in the financial sector demands that we adopt ‘predict-and-prevent’ as a standard duty of care,” she added.
"What drew me to Starling is that they are developing precisely the kind of instrumentation that this work demands," McCaul said. "Modern supervision needs tomorrow's tools — methods that make the organizational behavior observable, comparable across firms, and explainable to boards, courts, and the public. Starling is leading serious, disciplined work to make that possible, and convening broad public and private support for this endeavor,” she said. “I am delighted to support the continued progress of these crucial initiatives."
“Since the Global Financial Crisis, Elizabeth has been at the center of global efforts to make supervision more forward-looking, more disciplined, and more effective,” said Stephen Scott, Founder & CEO of Starling. “She has championed ideas central to our work: learning from the behavioral sciences and harnessing the promise of AI-powered ‘SupTech’ capabilities,” he added.
“Starling’s work begins from the simple premise that culture is not an abstract governance or supervisory concern,” Scott said. “Elizabeth has long maintained, culture works through feedback loops: it establishes behavioral norms, manifests in patterns of decision-making and observable conduct, and then reinforces the behavioral patterns people are expected to mimic,” he added. “This is as true for supervisory agencies as it is for the firms they oversee.”
“I am pleased to welcome Elizabeth to Starling’s advisory team as we expand our efforts to advance the tools, methods, and public-private coalitions that will be needed to move from retrospective diagnosis to proactive prevention. At a moment of heightened public and political scrutiny, success in this work is central to financial sector safety and stability and to the future of supervisory legitimacy,” Scott concluded.
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