Summit Consulting L.L.C

Ricardo L. Larrabure

“Ric” Larrabure is a 35 year veteran of the banking industry. Beginning in 1972 in California with Crocker National Bank, his first six years were in client facing positions including working with what was then the startup KKR on several leveraged buyouts. He was subsequently asked to evaluate the Chicago and New York International offices leading ultimately to their being significantly scaled back.

Between 1981 and 1986 he headed Strategic Planning for the Chairman, erected the IT and Operations required for transaction banking, and moved to Southern California as the Manager of half the branches in the southern part of the state.

With the acquisition by Wells Fargo, he stayed on for two years consolidating 135 branches in the southern-most part of the state to 85 and reducing the headcount from approximate 1500 to 850.

Joining ABN as the branch manager for San Francisco in 1988, the first job was to unwind a troubled credit which was causing the branch to lose money. With that done, the branch was set up into specialized units covering high technology, project finance and financial institutions. In three years San Francisco became one of the most profitable branches in the United States.

At the request of the senior executives in Amsterdam and Chicago, Ric was asked to takeover the Chicago branch in 1992. Using the same formula of specializing the marketing force and strengthening the credit function, the branch went through a period of excellent growth in profits.

In 1996, Ric was asked to go to Asia and be the CFO for the Asia Pacific Region headquartered out of Singapore. The region covered 16 countries triangulated between Pakistan, Japan and Australia. With regional IT also reporting in to this position, we speeded up the rollout of a common GL platform, then overlaid that with an Oracle data-warehouse and a number of reporting tools. Flash reports were available for the region within five working days, solid financials in eight.

Moving to Amsterdam in December of 1999, Ric was the CFO for the fledgling combination of E-commerce and Consumer Banking. As it became clear that the group would devolve, he moved over to be the CFO/COO of Transaction Banking.

Returning to the US in 2002 as the COO of the Clearing and Execution Services business, he played a key role in the sale of the businesses to UBS and Merrill Lynch. Subsequently, he was the COO for the Americas (in the Wholesale Bank) including all North American and Spanish speaking Latin American countries. In addition to ensuring the quality of financial reporting, this was the period where the regulators moved aggressively on the New York branch. Thus, the next year was spent cleaning up that office with its significant operating risks.

In July, 2006, Ric returned to Amsterdam to head the CoE Talent and Performance Management. One important contribution from the team included defining successors for the Top Executive Group from the next layer down with a very rigorous process. Also, to satisfy continued regulatory scrutiny, the team developed a clever mechanism called the “Gatekeeper” which put compliance immediately in front of every performance appraisal.

Ric “retired” July 1, 2007 and moved to Des Moines, Iowa with his wife, Joyce. At the moment, he is operating as a consultant for the bank heading the HR function for John Nelson and Pauline van der Meer Mohr. In this role, he is working with both Bank of America and RBS on the segregation of personnel, the movement of people between platforms and ensuring that a robust retention program is in place to keep our best people in place. Ric intends on resuming full-time coaching at the end of his contract with the bank in June, 2008.

He holds both a BS and an MBA in Finance and Accounting from San Jose University in California. Additionally, he attended the Senior Management Program at the Insead in France and is a certified Sherpa Coach from Penn State University in 2007.

Where I've Worked