Heidi Sexton is Sound Community Bank's chief fraud fighter. Sexton, the bank's executive vice president and chief operating officer, leads its two-year-old fraud committee.
The committee's work is paying dividends: it lowered the bank's fraud-related expenses by more than 33%—from $189,000 in 2024 to about $126,000 in 2025. The $1 billion community bank is on track this year to further reduce those expenses by nearly 60% compared with last year, to about $51,000. In addition, the bank said its anti-fraud initiative prevented more than $700,000 in fraud in 2025.
The fraud committee brings together employees from the retail, operations, compliance, anti-money laundering and technology departments. Each month, the committee reviews fraud activity and trends, discusses anti-fraud strategies, monitors fraud losses, evaluates fraud detection systems and considers other fraud-related matters.
A key to the success of the bank's anti-fraud campaign is the employee recognition program, which switched fraud prevention from merely a function to a joint responsibility. Sexton said the recognition program, launched by CEO Laurie Stewart, quickly made an impact.
"We expected it to reinforce good behavior over time. However, what we experienced was an immediate shift in mindset," Sexton said. "By consistently celebrating employees who stopped suspicious transactions or escalated concerns, we reframed fraud prevention from a specialized back-office function into a shared mission across the organization. It became less about following procedures and more about beating the bad guys."
Initial resistance to formation of the committee focused not on the mission of fraud prevention but instead on concerns about competing priorities, Stewart said. Employees were already coping with demanding workloads, she said, "and there was understandable hesitation about adding another standing commitment that required time, analysis and accountability."
But Sexton was an early convert to the idea, according to Stewart.
"She positioned it as a shared business responsibility and consistently demonstrated how fraud losses, customer impact, operational inefficiencies and regulatory risk affected every department," Stewart said. "She built credibility by ensuring meetings were productive, data-driven and focused on actionable outcomes rather than discussion for discussion's sake."
Sexton said that with the anti-fraud effort in place, employees recognize the best customer service might translate into rejecting a transaction or putting an extended hold on an account — actions that historically have been "the opposite of what was thought of as good client service."
The best "good" client service is protecting customers from losing their retirement savings or homes at the hands of sophisticated scammers, or stopping more than $250,000 in check fraud last year, Sexton noted.
"I believe Heidi would be the first to say that the committee's success is not that it solved fraud," Stewart said, "but that it created a sustainable framework for the bank to adapt and respond as fraud risks continue to change. That lasting capability may ultimately be the committee's most important achievement."
Team Members
Laurie Stewart, CEO
Heidi Sexton, Chief Operating Officer
Deena Rataezyk, Director of Marketing and Communications
Nancy Walwick, BSA Specialist
Evelyn Smith, Deposit Operations Manager
Joslyn Minks, Retail Training Administrator
