The OCC defines asset management as the business of providing financial products or services to a third party for a fee or commission. This broad definition covers a wide array of products and services, requiring examiners to develop expertise across multiple specialty areas within the asset management field, including:

• Wealth Management: Providing fiduciary, investment management, and custody services to affluent individuals, their families, and their businesses.
• Investment Management: Offering management or advisory services for investment portfolios or individual assets to both individuals and institutions.
• Corporate Trust: Delivering trustee, agency, fiduciary, escrow, and related services to private corporations and government entities.
• Retirement Services: Administering retirement plans and offering associated services, such as investment management and recordkeeping.
• Operations, Audit, & Internal Controls: Managing the systems and processes that support asset management accounts, clients, and assets—along with implementing internal controls and risk management practices to mitigate the operational, strategic, and compliance risk.

BIT supervision at the OCC covers a broad range of technology-related activities that are critical to the safety and soundness of financial institutions. Key focus areas include:

• BIT Management: a core component of an institution's overall corporate governance structure.
• IT Risk Management: Addresses a variety of risks, including emerging threats such as cybersecurity.
• Information Security Risk Management: Ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and data.
• Business Continuity and Resilience: Focuses on maintaining and restoring both technology functions and business operations.
• Acquisition and Development: Cover project management practices and controls related to software development.
• Technology Operations: Involves systems architecture, capacity management, and supporting infrastructure.
• Third-Party Risk Management: Oversees the risks associated with outsourcing of IT services.
• Integrated Examinations: Evaluate the effectiveness of IT operations supporting key business lines, such as credit, capital markets, asset management, and other risk areas.

The OCC issues regulations, conducts supervisory activities, and, when necessary, takes enforcement actions to ensure that financial institutions have effective controls in place and fulfill their legal obligation to help deter and detect money laundering, terrorist financing, and other criminal activities that could compromise the integrity of the U.S. financial system.

In this mission-critical role, you will assess banks' compliance with key laws and regulations, including the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), the USA Patriot Act, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) requirements, and anti-money laundering (AML) statutes.

The OCC defines Capital Markets as asset-liability management, treasury activities, and trading of financial instruments. This broad area involves a wide range of risk identification, management, and control functions, requiring examiners to develop specialized expertise in multiple disciplines within capital markets supervision.

• Asset-Liability Management: Involves balance-sheet mix, risk selection, modeling and reporting, hedging strategies, and associated control processes.
• Liquidity Risk Management: Covers the evaluation of retail and wholesale funding mix, risk measurement and monitoring, and contingency funding planning.
• Trading Activities: Includes managing market and credit risk exposures related to cash and derivative positions across trading portfolios and understanding the risk factors that influence pricing and liquidity in credit, currency, commodity, interest rate, and equity markets.
• Investment Activities: Focuses on setting portfolio objectives, conducting pre-purchase due diligence, applying portfolio analytics, and managing ongoing risk monitoring and reporting.

The OCC supervises all facets of commercial lending activities within financial institutions. This includes evaluating credit risk management practices to ensure they align with safe and sound banking principles.

Key responsibilities include:

• Monitoring Credit Risk Management: Assessing an institution's credit risk oversight, including control functions, lending policies, and overall portfolio condition.
• Transaction Loan Testing: Reviewing individual loans to evaluate underwriting standards, adherence to internal credit policies, and overall risk selection practices.
• Allowance for Credit Losses (ACL): Examining the methodology and assumptions used to calculate the ACL to ensure that the balance adequately covers expected credit losses across all applicable financial assets.
• Evaluating Credit Risk Oversight: Assessing bank management's ability to identify, manage, monitor, and control the credit risk within the portfolio. The OCC ensures that credit risks taken are prudent and commensurate with safe and sound banking practices.
• Expertise in Credit Risk Practices: OCC examiners are expected to have deep knowledge of credit risk evaluation and control techniques.

Compliance Examiners are responsible for evaluating a financial institution's overall compliance management program and assessing adherence to applicable laws and regulations. They support this work by developing supervisory policies, examination tools, training, and procedures. They also provide guidance to the industry, clarifying regulatory requirements related to consumer protection.

Mortgage Banking Examiners review the mortgage portfolios of financial institutions, assessing related policies, processes, and risk management practices. They also evaluate secondary marketing activities, which involve the sale and securitization of mortgage loans. These reviews help determine the level of risk present and how effectively bank management identifies, monitors, and controls that risk.

The OCC identifies operational risk as one of the most significant risks facing the banking industry today. It is the broadest component of OCC's supervisory framework and includes the risk of loss resulting from information system failures, business disruptions, human error, fraud, flawed business processes or product designs, and legal challenges.

While the OCC has long emphasized sound operations and internal controls, the collapse of several international banking firms in the 1990s marked a turning point, prompting both the industry and the OCC to treat operational risk as a distinct and critical risk discipline.

This broad scope offers examiners a wide range of career opportunities across several key areas:

• Operational Risk Management: Oversight of bank operations and processes, management information systems, payment systems, fraud risk management, internal controls, financial reporting, physical security, insurance and insurable risk, and other banking functions.
• Operational Risk Measurement: Involves Basel advanced approaches, Dodd-Frank Act stress testing, operational loss data collection, scenario analysis, and assessment of business environment and internal control factors.
• Enterprise Risk Management: Covers risk appetite frameworks, new product and process reviews, risk reporting, internal and external audit, and litigation risk management.

Retail Credit Examiners review the consumer lending portfolios of financial institutions, assessing the policies, processes, and risk management practices that govern those portfolios. These evaluations help determine the level of retail credit risk within the institution and how effectively bank management identifies, monitors, and controls that risk.