VIA Hosts Federal Reserve’s Woldman

Reducing the use of paper and staffing were topics touched on by Robb Woldman of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco during a talk before the Valley Industrial Association in Santa Clarita. Woldman, a 20-year veteran of the Federal Reserve and 25-year resident of Santa Clarita, first spoke at VIA in 2006 and discussed the changes that have occurred in the banking industry since his last speech, such as the electronification of the industry. Only 2 percent of the Federal Reserve is paper as of this point, and that the rest of their business has become electronic, said Woldman, a senior account officer of business development and Western regional automated clearinghouse specialist. Also, Woldman discussed employment levels at the Federal Reserve which he said had decreased from 700 to 100, with only 33 in his portion. Other questions from the audience included who would pay for identity theft due to electronification. Woldman said “unfortunately” the reserve and the business owner pay for this more than the consumer. Another audience member asked whether the Federal Reserve would step in to regulate electronic fraud from PayPal and whether they had any plans to do so in the future. Woldman said they did not regulate PayPal nor did the Federal Reserve have any plans to oversee it in the future. In this speech Woldman used a Power Point presentation to illustrate his points, peppering his speech with humor to keep the audience’s attention including multimedia such as videos and photos for comedic value and graphs to illustrate trends.