NDBA chair will focus on cybersecurity, legislative activity

Editor's note: Deneen Axtman, chief operating officer and SVP of Cornerstone Bank in Fargo, N.D., was recently named chair of the North Dakota Bankers Association. She spoke with BankBeat about the importance of culture, her work growing industry engagement, and the need for bankers to work together on regulatory changes. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. .Tell us about your personal background. How did you get into the banking business?.Deneen Axtman: I graduated from Moorhead State University in Minnesota back in the '80s, and took a job with Norwest Bank as a management trainee. I spent time in quite a few different departments, usually six weeks to three months in each, and that gave me an incredible knowledge base. From there, I spent time in marketing, supervised a loan documentation team, and became a business and ag banker. I also became a consumer banking manager about six years into that before I moved into retail district management..Around the same time, we merged with Wells Fargo. There, I managed quite a few locations and people for a handful of years. After almost 20 years, some coworkers and I went to Starion Financial and started at an office in Fargo. I worked there for four years in retail banking and as retail banking manager before coming to Cornerstone. .I've been here for 12 years, starting in retail, banking and marketing, and then as we went through a merger and added offices, my role kept growing. I added the teams for operations, IT, projects and facilities. Having all those together, we decided the best title for that was chief operating officer. I feel extremely fortunate to have been at Cornerstone for 12 years in the role that I'm in..What is Cornerstone's focus, its customer base? What continues to draw you into your work 12 years later?.Axtman: We are a $1.6 billion bank, and our biggest customer base is business and ag, but we are in different sized communities, from small to medium to large. What keeps me here is our culture. We have 10 stated values, and those values align with my personal values, and they're not just words on a wall or a canvas. They're actually who we are and how we live and how we make decisions here. Having that stated culture and really, actually living it is something that hasn't always happened in my career. What we say we do — we do. That's really important to me. .Culture is a big part of my role and making sure that we maintain our culture here, and that has a lot to do with the people, the processes and how we do things, how we take care of our customers, how we take care of our team, and how we take care of each other. That's critically important to me..What brought you to the North Dakota Bankers Association?.Axtman: Well, over my years of banking, I always heard good things about the NDBA. It was an opportunity for me to work with peers for the betterment of our industry and to learn more, too. I learned so much from the people whom I work with at NDBA or meet at NDBA events. There's so much power to come from the peer sharing that goes on. And then as far as the leadership roles at NDBA, whenever I've been asked to step up into a role, I've always thought that if they had the confidence in me, then I should have the confidence in me. So, when I was asked to step into the chair position, that's an opportunity for me to again, learn more, do more, be more engaged and help my industry. Hopefully, I'm able to help others be more engaged as well..Are there any issues that you see facing your state in terms of banking? Are there any projects or areas that you plan to focus on as you begin your year as chair?.Axtman: One of my goals — as it has been of all of my counterparts and the people who were in this role before me — is to engage more people in our legislative process and figure out how we can make a difference as an industry. With knowledge and with relationships, I think that's one thing for us to keep working on. To have more attendance at NDBA events, because they are good events. We have a great team, and anything they put on is top notch, so engaging and getting more people to attend and experience the peer groups and the group meetings, and the training, because it only makes us all better. .Two additional examples of issues facing our industry all over the place are fraud and cybersecurity risk. When we can learn from each other how to prevent fraud, it helps our customers and our banks. We just recently formed a fraud peer group, where there were so many people who wanted to be involved in it, we had to change it from being a peer group to an educational group, because there were too many people to just have peer conversations. So, obviously that's a need, so we have to work on it as an industry. And cybersecurity risk. It's not just training our bankers to avoid it and our team to avoid it, but our customers. How do we help them avoid it? How do we help them avoid fraud and cybersecurity risk? .We are competitors, but we are one industry, and I think we can only be better and stronger when we work together..How are banks doing on a national level and are there additional areas of concern other than the fraud and cybersecurity issues that you're seeing?.Axtman: I think banks are strong. I think our industry still remains strong. One of the things that we have to work the most on is the regulatory and legislative part of it, trying to have there be a less contentious relationship between our industry and the regulators. Banks want to do good by people. They want to do good by their communities and by the businesses and the people they serve. Some of the rulings that have come down and the regulations that they want to change, they're going to end up hurting our industry, hurting our customers. That's something that we need to work together on, so that we can remain strong and we can do the business that we were set out to do.