Building from the Ground Up: A Guide to Enterprise Risk Management in Community Banks and Credit Unions
Building an effective ERM program at a community bank or credit union is harder than the available guidance suggests. Most frameworks were designed for large institutions with dedicated risk teams, model validation groups, and budgets that community institutions will never see. The practitioners doing this work have to figure out what actually applies to them - and what to build first.
Building from the Ground Up is a complete, practical field guide written specifically for community banks and credit unions. It covers every component of a functioning ERM program from the ground up: governance and the three lines of defense, risk appetite that actually gets used in business decisions, the eight risk domains, risk and control self-assessment, key risk indicators, stress testing, examination readiness, and the cultural infrastructure that holds the program together over time.
The book is organized the way a program should be built - foundation first, structure second, risk domains third, integration fourth, and culture fifth. Each chapter addresses a real component of the program: what it is, how to build it, what regulators expect, and what the most common mistakes look like. Regulatory references are current, accurately cited, and mapped to both bank and credit union practitioners. Thirteen working appendices include sample templates, populated worksheets, implementation checklists, and worked examples drawn from a single fictional institution - Cornerline Federal Credit Union - that appears throughout the book as a concrete illustration of how the principles translate into practice.
Whether you are stepping into a Chief Risk Officer role for the first time, rebuilding a program that stalled, or pressure-testing what you have already built, this book gives you a clear and practical path forward. It is not a theoretical framework or a compliance checklist. It is the field guide that community bank and credit union risk practitioners have needed - written by a practitioner, for practitioners.
30 chapters. 13 working appendices. Everything you need to build something that actually works.
