Photo: Tom Williams/Sipa
Kathy Kraninger prepares to testify at a congressional hearing in 2019. Kraninger was director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Trump administration. She favors a "rational, surgical" approach to regulatory enforcement.
SHARE:
Economic Backbone: Financial Marketplace
Passing the Torch
Alex Sanchez reflects on three decades at the Florida Bankers Association, and his successor, CEO Kathy Kraninger, discusses her agenda.
There’s been a changing of the guard at the Florida Bankers Association, which lobbies Tallahassee and Washington, D.C., on behalf of the banking industry. Longtime leader Alex Sanchez has retired after 30 years with the organization, 26 as CEO. His successor, Kathy Kraninger, was director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Trump administration and is plotting a new course for the organization.
FLORIDA TREND took a look back with Sanchez and a look ahead with Kraninger. She’ll be only the fourth CEO of the trade group, which dates back to 1888.
When Sanchez, 66, thinks about his tenure with the FBA, he’s most proud of how Florida’s banking industry responded in times of crisis, particularly during the COVID pandemic and the Great Recession.
“When COVID-19 hit, the world came to a halt. And while our bigger corporations might have the capital to withstand any difficulties, how about our small business owners? They don’t have the capital to keep their doors closed for a year or two,” says Sanchez, who’s now president and CEO of the Salva Financial Group of Florida, a business consulting firm.
Florida bankers worked long hours helping companies navigate a dysfunctional Small Business Administration portal so they could get Paycheck Protection Program loans to stay afloat, he says. The result: Florida, the third-largest state, received the second-most PPP loans in the country.
Before that came the Great Recession of 2008-2009, when the collapse of a housing bubble led to waves of home foreclosures. “We entered into agreements to modify millions of mortgages so people could stay in their homes and get back on their feet,” Sanchez recalls.
Now enters Kraninger, 49, who arrives with decades of experience in government in Washington, D.C. Among other places, she worked at the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of Management and Budget. She also served as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps regulate financial institutions. Most recently she worked in regulatory strategy for a software startup.
The move from regulator to industry advocate gives her a useful perspective. “I understand where the government’s coming from,” she says. “One of the things that I really valued in my government career was an opportunity to dig into and understand how an industry operates — to learn how government regulation really affects it.”
She’s a proponent of “rational, surgical” regulatory enforcement. For example, some of the banking industry’s most powerful trade groups are fighting against bureaucratic updates to the Community Reinvestment Act, a 1977 law that encourages banks to lend to low- and moderate-income borrowers in their communities. Kraninger agrees with the law’s intent but says the way it’s being enforced is counterproductive and unnecessarily burdensome on small banks in particular.
She talks of getting the message out to the public and lawmakers about what lenders do for their communities. She also asks: “What can we do to make Florida an even friendlier place to open a bank or a business?”
