As NEACH’s Director of Education, Mary Mumper supports education initiatives, with a specific emphasis on enhancing NEACH’s payment innovation offerings. And as Lead Advisor for NEACH Payments Group (NPG), she also helps financial institutions, corporations, and vendors solve operational and regulatory challenges, manage risk, and drive financial and business improvement through NPG’s audit, risk management, and consulting services.
Mary has a long history in payments; she’s worked in banking for 20 years, most recently as Vice President and Lead Auditor at BMTechnologies, formerly known as BankMobile. She has been certified by NACHA as an Accredited ACH Professional (AAP) since 2011 and received her Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist (CAMS) certification in 2020.
Can you speak to your current role at NEACH and NPG? What is your main focus?
I'm going to be engaged in training and education for NEACH and working on audits and risk assessments for NPG. I’ve also started to become involved with faster payments, which I definitely find interesting.
Would you tell us more about your banking background?
I have been in banking for about 20 years. Aside from a stint as a teller, I have mainly worked as a supervisor or manager in item processing and deposit operations. I started at First Chicago, which was a regional bank in the late 1990s, and I have also worked for community banks in the Grand Rapids, Mich. area. The last bank I worked for in Michigan was bought out by state-wide bank in 2010.
At the time, I was in deposit operations, which is not typically an area that fares well during a merger or acquisition. I started looking for something else, and found a deposit operations position in New Haven, Conn., that really lined up with my experience: ACH, check processing, wires, mainly consumer accounts. It wasn’t a bank, but more of a FinTech, handling student loan disbursements from client colleges/universities to their students. That moved me from Michigan to Connecticut, and I was employed there for just over 11 years; I started in banking operations where we implemented remote deposit capture (RDC) using scanners and mobile deposit.
After a couple of years, I moved into a compliance role managing a team in banking operations responsible for first-line compliance monitoring, procedures, and training. I worked in that capacity for several years and then moved into internal audit.
How does your expertise and experience speak to specific challenges at financial institutions?
Something that has helped me at NEACH is that my banking background not only spans internal audit and compliance, but also operations. I understand how transactions process and the challenges the folks in operational roles face.
How do you see COVID-19 affecting the payments industry? What have been the pain points, as well as any unexpected silver linings?
COVID-19 has really moved electronic and faster payments to the forefront. Especially at the start of the pandemic, when no one wanted to take cash. And cash is disgusting! It’s so dirty. I remember being a teller and washing my hands and seeing so much dirt going down the drain.
So yes, COVID-19 accelerated electronic payments, where people are using cards or wanting to pay each other without cash (electronically) and have the payment go through immediately. And the payments industry had to move on this quickly. It has been a challenge for banks and operations teams to get used to a ways of processing transactions—and the rules around faster/real time payments.
What excites you most about your job?
I enjoy the work in general, and one of the things that led me to move from operations into compliance and then audit was that I enjoy compliance. I am a compliance nerd.
Specifically, I like ACH. One of the things I like about ACH is that the rules keep up with the technology. So many other regulations are very rarely updated; they are so far behind what is actually happening in the field that it’s a pain point. One of the things I appreciate about Nacha is how they keep up with the rules; they are relevant to how transactions are processed.
What excited me about this role at NEACH and NPG is that I like the idea of partnering with financial institutions to do their risk assessments or audits and assist in identifying areas where they may be exposed to risks, to see if there is something that can be done a better way, to help strengthen or advance their payments program, or even to confirm that they’ve got everything solid.
What hobbies or interests do you pursue out of work?
I’ve started taking curling lessons, which has been a lot of fun. I also love my morning spin classes. My boyfriend and I like live music. Jazz and blues are my favorites. We’re aging punk rockers, so we also like to go to random punk shows every now and then. We stay out of the pit these days though!
What was the best professional advice you’ve ever received?
Don’t take feedback too personally. Digest it and assess it. Either act on it or don’t, but don’t take it as an affront or personal jab.
What are you reading right now?
I just started a book called Grown Ups by Marian Keyes; she’s an Irish writer. I love her books. I also started Where the Tour Buses Don't Go: Chicago's Hidden Sites of the Mysterious, Macabre, Ghostly & Glamorous. Chicago is my favorite city.
What's your favorite movie of all time, and why?
This is difficult for me because my mood dictates what I want to watch. Laura is my all-time favorite serious detective noir movie. I also love Sabrina, with Audrey Hepburn. But if I’m in a less serious mood, it’s Airplane! or A Fish Called Wanda. Making a definitive decision on this topic is very difficult.
Contact Mary in Members Corner, by email mmumper@neach.org, or phone: 781-321-1011.