DALLAS — Hyundai Capital America’s Chief Risk Officer Marcelo Brutti has been focused on structuring the risk team to make better use of existing resources.
“When I first joined Hyundai, I only had half of a team,” Brutti told attendees at Auto Finance Performance and Compliance Summit. “So, we didn’t actually grow the headcount in the two and a half years, but we repositioned people and created new teams.”
Before joining Hyundai in 2016, Brutti worked in the risk departments of banks such as Santander Bank, TD Bank, and Wells Fargo, and used experiences learned in those institutions to inform his decisions at Hyundai. For example, Hyundai created new teams to maximize efficiency and various skill sets, such as a team that reviews the decisions made by underwriters and a new fraud team.
“You can have a great tool, but if you don’t have the right people, you’re not going to be able to use it,” Brutti said. “You can have great people, but if they don’t have the right tools, they won’t be able to maximize their knowledge and expertise, so we try to give them both.”
While risk management policies at banks helped inform the strategy for Hyundai, the captive is less regulated, which allows Brutti to implement certain policies of choice without wasting additional resources.
“We did things at banks because we were forced by regulators to do them,” Brutti explained. “We knew some of them weren’t the most efficient or effective, but we still had to do them. So the opportunity I have now at Hyundai, which is much less regulated, is the ability to actually pick what I know works and implement it at our company. I’m not going to waste resources, time, and money on doing things that I know will not bring any value.”
You can listen below to more of Marcelo Brutti’s thoughts on compliance and risk, such as his day-to-day responsibilities and the risk teams he’s reshaped.
This is a part of an ongoing video series from Auto Finance News from our coverage at the Auto Finance Performance and Compliance Summit.
