Senior Vice President of Global Finance, Capital One

>> My name is Jeff Norris. I'm currently the Senior Vice President of Global Finance at Capital One. I have several responsibilities in that role, chief among them is managing our relationships on Wall Street and with large institutional investors. I also provide strategic advice and counsel to our CFO and CEO pretty much on a daily basis and also have some small responsibility for government relations and lobbying in Washington DC. So, they're 2 very distinct worlds. We're the now sixth- or seventh-largest bank in the country so we have 1,000 branches and banking and depository relationships with consumers. We're a very large credit card issuer, which is how most people know us. We also are in commercial lending and all aspects of banking on the retail side. What I do is not part of that line function of Capital One but it's dealing with all the folks who own our stock and who provide us with investment banking services. So, we're, we're not a Wall Street investment bank by any stretch of the imagination. So when we're issuing securities or acquiring other companies and so forth, we, we engage Wall Street investment banks to help us and they serve us as, as their client and I manage a lot of those relationships and basically share our strategies and our results with large institutional investors who hold our stock. Probably about half my time is internally focused, giving strategic advice and participating in the setting of strategy and decision making of the firm. My role in that, we've got a lot of really brilliant people who run the numbers and who are more, sort of traditional strategists and decision makers in the business but when you work for a large public company, this is kind of business school 101, when you work for a large public company, the goal that you're really in service of all time is quote-unquote maximizing the value of the company. Well, the people who determine the value of the company are the shareholders and so understanding their point of view, if we, for example in the last couple of years we made a major acquisition of ING Direct. Trying to decide whether or not to do something like that depends a lot on how it's going to be viewed by the shareholders. Well you can't, in today's world, go and ask shareholders what they think of decisions you haven't made yet and so I kind of represent the voice of the markets and the shareholders and I give interpretations of how people outside the company are likely to perceive and assign value to the various decisions and choices that we might make. I spend about half of my time doing that. It's actually my favorite part of the job because before I came to Capital One, I was a, a, a partner in a strategy consulting firm, so providing strategic advice, participating in the strategic decisions of the company, is the part of my job I like the best. The other half of what I spend my time on is actually telling our story to external parties outside of Capital One, chief among them the large institutional investors who hold our stock, also to a smaller extend fixed-income investors who might buy our bonds, rating agencies like Standard and Poor's and Moody's, who are, you know, rendering opinions on us and I spend a fair amount of time with our larger commercial banking clients, sort of sharing our results and our strategies. So, I spend, the split of my time is about 50 50 but they're, right after we release quarterly earnings, for example, I'll spend 100 percent of my time answering questions and traveling around the country, meeting with our large institutional investors, and then sort of in the middle of the quarter I spend 100 percent of my time participating in internal meetings and the decision-making process and strategy setting of the company.