The go-to for model certifications enjoys training others to do the same
Beth Doering is always learning.
And as she has grown throughout her career, she has held many roles from credit union examiner to internal auditor to director of training.
Now Senior Vice President, Beth Doering has made MountainView Risk & Analytics her home base for the past 17 years.
Finding the just-right fit
Fresh out of college with an accounting degree, Doering didn’t know she was headed to a career in finance. It’s just where she landed her first job, found she liked it and stayed.
Her first job was as a credit union examiner. Then, after about three years, she landed a new job in internal auditing for a large, ten-bank holding company. There, she found a new passion.
“While I was there, we had gotten some software to help us do audits, and they wanted to put that software out to the banks, so they could do audits themselves,” Doering recounts. “So I kind of took to that software, and I taught all the affiliate banks how to use it. And I thought, ‘I really like this. I like teaching people how to do things.’”
This realization led her to her next job: teaching ALM software at a local company. Ultimately, she rose to the Director of Training role, which led to her traveling three weeks each month. And after seven years, this put Doering in a position to look for her next career move: McGuire Performance Solutions, which was later acquired by MountainView, was hiring.
“I could do ALM model valuations there. It’s more of an audit, but you were training people on how to use the model and set it up properly, so they could get the best results to make the best decisions,” she says.
And while her job has evolved over the years, and she rarely does valuations anymore, the company ended up being just the right fit. In July, Doering will celebrate her 17th anniversary with MountainView.
Applying and teaching her model expertise
Over time, Doering has seen her roles and responsibilities at MountainView shift. In the beginning, she worked mostly with ALM models. Any time new vendor software arrived, she was the go-to person to figure it out.
“That’s kind of filtered out now,” she reflects. “I’ve cross-trained people, so we have more than one person that knows an ALM model. I do a lot of cross-training and model certifications. An ALM vendor will contact us, and we certify the model math to make sure that everything is correct.”
Doering has also expanded out to doing Excel models for liquidity models. The financial institutions will build a liquidity model in Excel, and then she will dig through the formulas to make sure everything is correct.
Additionally, she contributes to ensuring top-notch quality at Mountain View: “Once a consultant finishes a project, it goes through another set of eyes for review before the final gets sent off to the client. So I do a lot of work in the review process.”
Guiding the decision-making process
Doering is so careful about quality because she knows how important these models are to clients.
“They’re making decisions on them with ALM. We’re making sure that the setup is right, the assumptions are right because they’re making decisions on, as rates move, how does that affect their bottom line?” she says. “So the one thing we’re looking at is to help them to make sure that they have the right data, assumptions, and inputs into the model, so they’re getting good results to make decisions on.”
All organizations want to make sound decisions. Right now, post-COVID, the big question for many financial institutions is liquidity.
“Through the pandemic, there was an influx of all of this extra cash into financial institutions with the paycheck protection plan loans and the government checks for COVID, so right now they have a lot of excess liquidity in the institution,” she says. “So liquidity is really important to see as those funds start leaving. Do they have enough cash to be able to cover those funds?”
The pandemic has had clear ramifications for the industry over the past few years. Stepping back, Doering can also take a broader view of trends in the industry over the length of her career.
“You know when I first started 17 years ago, it was the Treasury Department that was hiring us to do the validations. Now that’s expanded. A lot of the larger financial institutions have Model Risk Management groups. Those groups are responsible for all models within the financial institution,” she states. “So our customer has changed now from being the Treasury group to Model Risk Management or internal audit. So we have to change the way we manage our projects now.”
So over time, not only has the way Doering guided clients changed, but the way she manages projects has changed as well. A career with longevity requires flexibility and adaptation.
Working from home (and getting out and about!)
When asked about her favorite part of her job, Doering doesn’t hesitate: “I like helping people to better their models, to make better decisions for their organization.”
“[And] I like working from home,” she laughs. “That was a big change—from being gone all the time to working from home all the time.”
Of course, Doering still gets out for some fun outside of work. A fan of gardening and travel, she especially loves any activity where Gracie, her Miniature Schnauzer, can tag along.
She also enjoys domestic travel, making it her goal to get to all 50 U.S. states. She started logging her efforts when she worked as a software trainer and realized she was traveling so much.
“My goal is to do all 50 states. I think I have about eight states left to go. I’ve gotten hard ones–Alaska and Hawaii. I still need to go to Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, and New Hampshire.”
Doering also makes extra trips to states where she has family, of course: “I have a niece and nephew that live in Florida, so we go there a lot.”
The career that has it all
In addition to fun and travel, Doering is enthusiastic about plans at work.
“We have some new hires coming on, so I think I’ll be doing the training for that. I’m really looking forward to training new hires,” she says.
Reflecting on her past, Doering realizes that she should have considered being a teacher since she enjoys the teaching and training elements of her job so much.
“I guess I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I grew up: ‘I want to be a teacher.’ ‘I want to be a programmer,” she laughs. “I went into accounting—but still ended up doing a lot of those things.”
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