Laura Kemper Glass, chair of SFNet’s WISF Committee, is senior vice president and senior portfolio manager for Bank of America Business Capital (BABC).  Based in Atlanta, Glass is responsible for the middle market and large corporate asset-based lending portfolio in the Eastern United States and Europe and the lower middle market portfolio nationwide. In this role, she leads a team of credit professionals responsible for managing a $20 billion portfolio of credit commitments in the asset-based lending plus related products and solutions. The team serves clients in a wide range of industries primarily in the middle market and large corporate space.

Prior to joining Bank of America, Glass was a certified public accountant and spent nine years with the international accounting firm, KPMG, achieving the level of senior manager. She joined Bank of America via predecessor entity Fleet Capital in 1995 as a senior underwriter responsible for underwriting new business transactions. In 1998, she joined the portfolio management team of BABC.

Glass has a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Florida State University. She is a CPA (inactive) and a FINRA Registered Principal with Series 7, 24 and 63 securities licenses. She lives in Atlanta, GA, with her husband, Greg, and their two sons.

You spent nine years as a CPA at the beginning of your career. How did this time prepare you for roles that followed, and the current role you’re in now?

In public accounting, I was exposed to a variety of industries, many that we bank today. I also audited many financial institutions during my time at KPMG, so I was able to understand the interworking and regulatory requirements of financial institutions during that time. I started with Bank of America in underwriting, and the audit skills that I learned and used at KPMG translated very nicely into an underwriting role. The exposure to such a broad array of industries and companies of different sizes prepared me very well for commercial lending.

What are some of the main concerns or challenges you’re seeing within the secured finance community now?

Finding and retaining talent within secured lending is the biggest challenge we face right now. It’s important to attract young people into the industry, develop them and keep them motivated and challenged, so they will want to stay. It’s relatively easy to recruit people from college campuses, but once they’ve received the training and banking experience, it’s hard to keep them from using that experience to catapult into a bigger job someplace else, oftentimes outside of our industry.

It seems to me that we have a talent gap between the very seasoned, experienced lenders, who are potentially nearing the end of their careers, and those who have not been in the industry very long. Anyone with less than about 13 years of experience, was not in place during the last financial crisis. So, the biggest challenge is developing younger talent to take on the bigger roles as the more experienced people retire. Attracting diverse people in the secured lending community is another challenge.

Click here for the full interview. 

Editor’s Note: SFNet’s WISF Conference will be held June 15-16 in New York City. For details click here