Voice of Experience: Anne Wallace, Executive Director, Identity Theft Assistance Center
by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)
Anne Wallace is a trailblazer. In a 35-year career in banking and financial services that has taken her from the public to the private sector and back again, Wallace has broken down barriers for women and has reshaped the industry in the process.
Born and raised in New York City, she attended Fordham University as an undergraduate – one woman of the small group which made up Fordham’s second ever co-ed graduating class. She went on to law school at Boston University, where again she was a part of the first group of women to attend law school there. She knew as she was going through law school that she would end up in financial services, a fact that she credits to having grown up surrounded by finance and retail in Manhattan.
She started her legal career at the Federal Reserve Board, where she wrote regulations to implement the Equal Credit and Opportunity Act (ECOA), which gave women the right to get credit in their own name. “Before [the ECOA], women were routinely asked to get their husband’s signatures for loan or credit applications…Women didn’t have their own credit,” explained Wallace. In addition to writing detailed rules for the implementation of the ECOA, Wallace was charged with explaining and selling it to the all-male banking industry. Wallace called the work “challenging” but said that “after a while, you get used to being the only woman in the room.” She credited “confidence in the product (the ECOA), as well as humor” for allowing her to be successful in that role.
After six years at the Fed, she moved into private practice in Philadelphia and then into the role as corporate counsel with CoreStates Financial, a large financial services company that is now a part of Wachovia. She then served as general counsel of a bank in Delaware before becoming legal advisor to the U. S. Treasury Department’s initiative to convert the federal government’s paper-based collections and disbursements to electronic funds transfers.
In the late-1990’s, she again left the public sector to lead the privacy consulting practice at KPMG. “Although I loved the law and being a lawyer, I started to feel that there was more I could do with my knowledge [of law and the financial industry] than just law,” said Wallace. While at KPMG, Wallace helped some of the biggest financial companies with their nascent privacy issues. “You have to remember that this was years before anyone even started to think about privacy.”
Then, five years ago, Wallace decided that she had the knowledge — and the resources/contacts –to help people fight identity theft. At the Financial Services Roundtable, she helped convince the CEOs of 50 financial services companies (all men) together to fund, ITAC, the Identity Theft Assistance Center, as a free service for their customers. “Wells Fargo and Wachovia were the first to put up money, then it was fifty of the biggest financial services companies that threw in funds,” said Wallace.
With those financial companies behind her, she launched ITAC and has been a crusader, working hard everyday to help restore people’s financial identities. Under Wallace’s stewardship, ITAC has helped more than 40,000 customers and has forged data sharing agreements with the Federal Trade Commission and other federal agencies to help them investigate and prosecute identity crime. She said of the venture, “I’m really excited. This is something that has never been done before…The financial services is the only industry that is doing this sort of thing” but that this sort of collective action is essential given the nature of the problem.
It is estimated that 9 million people this year will have their identities stolen this year. Wallace continues to bring together business, law enforcement and consumers to assist these victims of identity theft and to find an innovative solution to identity theft once and for all.
