He writes the policies. Sound credit is music to Bob de Buys' ears, and his artistry is on record at SouthTrust Bank��maybe even compact disk

Bob de Buys knows a thing or two about credit policy. In fact, you could call him the Barry Manilow of the credit policy at SouthTrust Bank.

"You could say that," de Buys laughs. "He writes the songs, I write the policies!" While there is no international fan club (to date) for de Buys, he is not without his loyal followers.

De Buys is the bank's senior vice president and manager of credit policy. He serves as the bank's chief credit policy officer in charge of loan policy and is a member of the senior loan committee, credit review committee, and credit policy committee.

"We're trying to make sure our credit policy balances with our risk appetite," says de Buys. "We formally review our policy twice a year and ask the people responsible for various types of lending if they recommend any changes--for example, preleasing requirements in retail properties. Generally, there are no major changes, just subtle ones."

De Buys has been with SouthTrust for more than 25 years (Manilow has been a recording artist for 33 years), through several business cycles, and he has seen many changes in the ways loans have been approved. The most significant, he says, has been the move from the committee approval to the signoff structure. "The number of loans to be approved is just too high as banks get larger, so it is not efficient to have all loans move through the committee process. The key is to make sure you have sound policies and people with the right credit culture making those decisions."

While Manilow has seen LPs give way to eight-track, then cassette and CD, de Buys has seen loan changes and more at SouthTrust; and de Buys has enacted some changes himself in other areas. For example, in 1979 he created the first in-house financial statement spreadsheet program using VisiCalc on an Apple 2c. It and its improvements, using Lotus and finally Excel software, were used at SouthTrust up until it adopted a Moody's product this past year. He also started the practice of hiring off-site professional credit analysts, a cost-effective way of expanding the talent pool of qualified, self-motivated analysts.

A long-time RMA member, de Buys is a past chair of both the Birmingham and Southern chapters and a past member of several committees, including the Credit Systems Committee, Chapters and Membership Committee, Diversity Committee, and Membership Committee. He continues to serve as a director for the Birmingham board. His years of hands-on running of chapter events and programs is well documented in the Southern Chapter archives. Over the years, de Buys has served as moderator for the RMA Southeast Regional Spring Conference numerous times (his latest stint was with SunTrust SCO Sandry Jansky as co-moderator in New Orleans in 2003). From time to time, he is called upon by local chapters to moderate local round tables, and he is a staple at Birmingham events as a panelist or speaker. To the best of RMA's knowledge, Manilow isn't even a member.

De Buys stays this active even though he generally works at the bank only in the morning--and only seven months of the year. For five months of the year, he can be found off-site at his Adirondack home in New York State, but he's still working. As he says, "I have my phone, my fax, my computer--and my UPS guy! What more do I need?" (Manilow's roots are in Brooklyn, New York! Coincidence? We think not.)

"I enjoy the amount of networking I've gotten from RMA," adds de Buys. "You know, people always ask, 'What's in it for me?' when I ask them to volunteer. With RMA, there's plenty. Just get involved and they'll discover that for themselves."

So who comes out ahead? We think de Buys!

[c] 2004 by RMA. McGinn is a Ft. Washington, Pennsylvania-based freelance writer and desktop specializing in financial and business topics.

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