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Earlier this year, Frank Austin ’92 was named head of asset and liability management and acting head of operational risk management at Bank of New York.
Each day is a challenge and full of pressure as he fulfills the responsibilities of the separate positions.
“As head of asset liability management I’m responsible for the risk in the balance sheets of the bank — trying to be forward-looking as to what the competition’s balance sheets will be, what our income will be, what the returns on the assets and the liabilities will be coming in as, ” Austin says. “For operational risk management, I’m responsible for minimizing our losses for our day–to-day activities throughout the bank.”
Although he manages different people for the different positions from different offices, and has few spare minutes in his days, his management duties for the Bank of New York are nothing compared to what he faced at Lafayette as president of his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta.
“It was a tougher management job to manage the 19- and 20-year-olds who aren’t getting paid than what I’m doing now,” says Austin, who graduated with a double major in history and economics and business. “When you’re working with fraternity people who are motivated by doing good, your motivation becomes focusing on that. But your work also comes into conflict with other commitments.
“Being president my sophomore year and then president of the inter-fraternity council my junior year gave me an opportunity to be in management situations at a very young age. I was responsible for the building, for housing, feeding these people, trying to keep a bunch of rowdy 19- and 20-year-olds out of trouble, and staying on top of the philanthropy that goes with fraternities. Working with the inter-fraternity council, I had an opportunity to network across the entire campus. At that time, 50 percent of the campus was Greek, and I got a diverse look at the campus as I managed and built the council with a number of diverse people. I was managing the process at a very young age and it helped my leadership skills.
“And our inter-fraternity advisor, Ted Chase, pushed me always to be the best that I could be and to make our fraternities the best they could be.”
For Austin, who was intrigued by the continually-changing nature of the stock market as a child and had always wanted to become involved in the financial industry, the academic experiences he had at Lafayette were just as important to his recent success as his extra-curricular ones.
“I enrolled in the courses I liked, not just because they had a reputation,” Austin says. “I found that certain professors, Donald Miller in particular, kind of helped to harvest my desire to learn more. I had five or six classes with professor Miller, including a pilot program called ‘common experience,’ where a number of freshman, instead of taking freshman English, studied different cities at different times in history, such as Renaissance Florence, 19th Century Chicago and 20th Century Tokyo. Professor Miller just had this breadth of knowledge, an interdisciplinary approach to looking at the coursework, and tremendous enthusiasm.”
It was those early intellectual experiences that instilled in Austin a curiosity that continues to drive him today.
“I am still going down the road of reaching my dreams; I feel like I am only partway through the journey,” Austin says. “This promotion is a milestone along the way, but I still have a long way to go and I need to keep moving down that road.
“When I got to Lafayette, I wasn’t really much of a student. I got by, but it was during my time there that I developed a thirst for knowledge and an understanding of the importance of education — I have since gone on to receive a MBA in finance from New York University and an taking classes for a Ph.D. in financial economics from Fordham University in New York. When I got to Lafayette, I never would have thought I could have done those things, but at Lafayette I learned to understand how important it is to continue learning and growing.”