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In June, SourceMedia Research — an affiliate of American Banker — conducted a survey of 52 chief operating officers and other operations executives on a range of topics, including COOs' top priorities and what they think will be their future role. The data suggests COOs are concerned with regulatory trends and security threats and view themselves as change agents. Many aspire to one day become a CEO. Here are some data snapshots.
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No Clear-Cut Path

Not surprisingly, COOs often have a general administrative background before becoming their bank's No. 2 executive. When asked to name all of their previous roles, COOs picked "General/operations/administrative" more than any other, nearly half the time. But the path to becoming a COO is anything but standard. Also participating in the survey were former project managers, IT specialists, those who had worked in customer relations, credit officers and business executives.
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COOs' Top Priorities

When COOs were asked to choose their "top three priorities," the areas most selected were day-to-day oversight of business operations (chosen 57.7% of the time), customer experience (40.4%), and organization leadership (40.4%). But not far behind was: staying current with regulations. Of the 52 participants, 16 (or 30.8%) chose "keeping up with regulatory trends" as one of the top three.
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Making the Trains Run on Time

In the survey, nearly 35% of the respondents selected as their top priority the day-to-day oversight of business operations. That was followed by organization leadership at just over 19%.
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Regulations, Security Threats Weigh on COOs

COOs and other operation executives indicated that there has been a substantial progression in how much attention they pay to regulatory trends and security threats. Nearly 37% of the survey field said "keeping up with regulatory trends" had "strongly increased" in priority from the previous year, and nearly 47% said it had "moderately increased." On keeping up to date with security threats, nearly 43% said that had "strongly increased" in priority, compared with nearly 41% saying it had "moderately increased."
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COO as Stepping Stone

The common succession practice of promoting COOs to the CEO's office was supported in the data when respondents were asked what they think their next role will be. The most frequent response was that they would remain as a COO or operations exec at their current institution (28.8%), but right behind that 25% said they viewed a CEO position as their next destination.
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Change Maker

A quarter of the executives in the survey said "Driver of change" best described their current role as COO, followed by "Problem solver," which was chosen by just over 23%, and "Leader of strategy execution" (17%).
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Top Challenges Facing COOs

When chief operating officers were asked to name their top challenges, 63% included "keeping up to date with regulatory requirements" as a top challenge, followed by "keeping up with technology" (53.8%), "managing change" (50%), and the "increase in fraud/security breaches" (44%).
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