Three top staff member appointments were announced Tuesday by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), including a replacement for the departing general counsel of the agency.
Nick Podsiadly will become general counsel of the deposit insurance agency April 8, FDIC Chairman Jelena McWilliams stated in a release. He will replace Charles Yi, who announced earlier this month he was resigning. Harrel Pettway has been promoted to senior deputy general counsel; Leonard Chanin has joined the agency as deputy to McWilliams.
Podsiadly is now deputy general counsel and senior vice president for Fifth Third Bancorp, Cincinnati, Ohio (the same bank where McWilliams served as general counsel before moving to FDIC). According to the FDIC, at Fifth Third Podsiadly oversees regulatory legal matters, supervisory examinations, regulatory interactions, and government affairs.
He has also worked for Regions Financial Corp. of Birmingham, Ala., the American Bankers Association (ABA) in Washington, D.C., and on Capitol Hill for the Senate Finance and Judiciary Committees (for chairman and ranking member, respectively, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa). He received a Juris Doctor from Drake University Law School and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Iowa State University, the FDIC said.
Pettway was deputy general counsel in the agency’s legal division before being promoted; he joined the FDIC in July 2015. He has also worked as a top legal officer for the Defense Logistics Agency and the Defense Technical Information Center, both at Fort Belvoir, Va. He received a J.D. from George Mason University School of Law; a post-graduate certificate from Harvard University; a Master of Business Administration from Troy University; a Master of Science in Joint Strategic Leadership from The Air War College; and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management and Economics from the State University of New York. He also is a graduate of the Stonier Graduate School of Banking at the University of Pennsylvania.
Chanin joined the FDIC March 18 as McWilliams’ deputy, also moving over from Fifth Third. The FDIC said he will advise McWilliams on consumer protection issues, including further expanding access to banking services for unbanked and underbanked consumers, strengthening consumer research functions at the FDIC, and building upon the activities of the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion (ComE-IN). Also, he will advise on FDIC Tech Lab’s (FDiTech) efforts to promote the adoption of innovative and transformative technologies in the financial services sector.
At Fifth Third, he was deputy general counsel and senior vice president since 2017. Prior to that (and among other things), he served at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) as assistant director of the Office of Regulation, where he was responsible for implementing federal consumer financial services laws. Before that, the FDIC said, he served for two decades in the Federal Reserve’s division of consumer and community affairs, most recently as the division’s deputy director, providing legal opinions and policy recommendations to the board and other activities. (McWilliams is also a Federal Reserve veteran.) The FDIC said Chanin holds a J.D. from Washington University School of Law and a Bachelor of Arts in political science, cum laude, from American University.