Biden to Name CBDC Advocate Saule Omarova to Lead OCC

President Joe Biden has announced that he plans to nominate Saule Omarova for Comptroller of the Currency and Claudia Slacik as Member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, according to a White House press release.

Omarova, if confirmed, will be the first woman and person of color to be comptroller, the release stated. She is an expert on issues involving the regulation of systemic risk and structural trends in the financial markets.

She is a professor of law at Cornell University and the director of the Program on the Law and Regulation of Financial Institutions and Markets of Cornell’s Jack Clarke Institute for the Study and Practice of Business Law, according to the release.

Before that, Omarova was the George R. Ward Associate Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and taught courses at Georgetown University Law Center, the release stated. And before joining academia, Omarova practiced law in the New York firm Financial Institutions Group of Davis, Polk, & Wardwell. There, she specialized in corporate transactions and financial regulation advisory work.

She also worked as a special advisor for regulatory policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2006 to 2007, according to the release.

Omarova has been called a critic of traditional banking and of Wall Street. She has said before that she thinks government needs to play more of a role there.

Read more: Biden to Name Wall Street Critic Saule Omarova to Lead OCC

Meanwhile, Slacik has worked in financial services for over 30 years, the release stated. She has specialized in financial restructurings, risk management, corporate finance, trade finance and general management.

Slacik has worked for J.P. Morgan, Citibank and Bankers Trust in New York and London, and she was appointed by the President Barack Obama administration as Chief Banking Officer at the Export-Import Bank of the United States. She served in that role from 2013 to 2016, according to the release.