Raymond Jia Wins William Taylor Award

Shaohui (Raymond) Jia received an award for supervisory excellence.

The William Taylor Award honors stellar contributions to the Federal Reserve System’s supervisory program. Shaohui (Raymond) Jia, of the Supervision, Regulation, and Credit (SRC) department, created a statistical model to identify Bank Secrecy Act /Anti-Money Laundering (BSA/AML) risk. The goal of the model is to rank state member banks into high-, medium-, and low-risk categories based on the institution’s level of BSA/AML risk. The new model outperformed the existing one. The Board of Governors fast-tracked the BSA model in 2019 in efforts to ease the regulatory burden on low-risk community banks, a process that Governor Michelle Bowman championed. “This tool is win-win: it lessens burden on community banks and helps regulators be more efficient at what they do,” said Chris Henderson, vice president in Supervision, Regulation, and Credit, who supervises the Risk Analytics and Surveillance (RAS) team. “This honor was a surprise, but it reflects the years of work and collaboration,” said Jia. “It honors our entire team … the RAS Unit, SRC department, and the Bank.”

Sydney Diavua Wins Janet Yellen Award

Sydney Diavua earned an award for her work on the Fed’s racial equity learning community.

The Janet L. Yellen Award for Excellence in Community Development was established in 2018 to celebrate the accomplishments of employees who moved the needle toward a more inclusive, vibrant economy. Sydney Diavua spent five years in the Community Development and Regional Outreach Department in Philadelphia, before moving to the St. Louis Fed in April 2020. Diavua earned the award along with two other colleagues for turning a racial equity lens to the community development work of the Federal Reserve System. Diavua and her partners across the System will continue their work with the learning community. Implementing the strategies they developed and making their System partners even more aware of the principles being used can help people understand the process involved in rebuilding the economy, she said. “We all need to be affirmative about race and racial equity,” said Sydney. “We can’t just talk to each other about the problems. We need to include more people in the conversation and actually do something about it.”