Recently penalized USAA adds chief risk officer

Singh will lead USAA’s risk and compliance organization and report directly to CEO Wayne Peacock. His hiring comes nearly four months after USAA Federal Savings Bank was fined $85 million by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for compliance risk management failures.

“With Neeraj Singh, USAA is adding a highly talented risk professional with two decades of global leadership and risk management experience,” said Peacock in a press release. “We are excited to benefit from his deep experience across multiple products, services and risk types, and his proven ability to build strong teams.”

When USAA was fined by the OCC in October, the regulator said the bank “failed to implement and maintain an effective compliance risk management program and an effective IT risk governance program commensurate with the bank’s size, complexity, and risk profile.” The OCC further noted USAA had “deficiencies in all three lines of defense—first-line business units, independent risk management, and internal audit—in its compliance risk management program.”

According to the OCC, these deficiencies resulted in violations of consumer protection laws, including the Military Lending Act and the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. The regulator’s consent order was light on further details, including the specifics of the law violations and how many consumers were harmed.

Singh joins USAA from Citigroup, where he was chief risk officer, U.S. consumer bank and head of global consumer risk modeling, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to his nearly four years at Citi, he held customer and risk management leadership positions with TD Bank and Barclays. He had also worked at Citi from 2002-07 in various risk, finance, and decision management roles.

Along with the hiring of Singh, USAA promoted Paul Vincent to serve as president of USAA Federal Savings Bank. Vincent was chosen for the position after seven years of leadership at USAA, including the past two years as senior vice president and head of retail banking.