Leanne Duran

Leanne Duran is Chief Risk Officer at Wings Credit Union, where she oversees regulatory compliance, enterprise security, risk management, and risk operations and strategy. As a CPA, CIA and CCUE, she has held senior leadership roles focused on strengthening enterprise risk frameworks, governance and organizational resilience. Duran combines financial expertise with strategic risk leadership to support sound decision-making.

The Beginnings of a Distinct Risk Leadership Philosophy

Leanne Duran’s journey into risk leadership began with an early personal experience that taught her the meaning of financial trust.

Years ago, her mother, a Cuban immigrant, visited a large bank to secure a home equity line of credit. She expected to sign documents reflecting the terms they had agreed upon, but discovered that the interest rate had been increased. When she objected, she was pressured to sign. She later called her daughter in tears, unsure of what to do.

Duran was still early in her consulting career at the time, but she already understood consumer protection regulations such as Dodd-Frank and UDAAP. She went to the bank and argued that her mother should not have been pressured into accepting terms she had never agreed to. Bank representatives initially suggested that a language barrier might have caused the misunderstanding. Duran rejected that explanation. Her mother had taught in Denver Public Schools for 35 years and spoke English well.

Within days, her mother received revised loan documents reflecting the original interest rate.

For Duran, the experience shaped a leadership philosophy grounded in trust. Financial institutions must be places people can trust, and risk professionals lead the efforts to safeguard that trust.

That conviction continues to guide her work at Wings Credit Union. Today, Duran oversees a broad risk portfolio spanning regulatory compliance, enterprise security, risk management and risk operations and strategy.

Making Risk a Trusted Partner

In a demanding risk environment, every issue can seem urgent. Duran understands that treating everything as a priority makes it harder to identify what matters most.

Rather than building a risk function that attempts to control every decision, she focuses on developing a knowledgeable leadership team capable of recognizing which issues require deeper attention. She develops risk leaders who can build relationships across the organization and serve as trusted advisors. Her approach centers on developing leaders who are confident in addressing risks at their source and who understand when an issue warrants escalation for enterprise-level visibility and guidance.

The qualities Duran seeks in risk leaders reflect her broader view of the function. She believes the biggest misconception is that risk must always be “the hammer.” Its true purpose, however, is to help an organization understand when and how it can responsibly say “yes” to risk.

Reaching the point of saying “yes” requires trust and collaboration. When business leaders trust risk professionals enough to involve them early, potential problems can be identified before they become expensive or disruptive. According to her, risk should help organizations see those problems early.

Building a Culture That Surfaces Problems

Duran believes the risk function has a powerful role to play during periods of organizational change. Drawing on personal experience across banks, credit unions, and non-bank financial institutions, she understands that mergers can unintentionally reinforce existing assumptions unless organizations create space to question them. One of the most important safeguards is creating a culture in which employees feel safe challenging those assumptions. A strong merger gives both sides permission to raise concerns, ask questions and be transparent about what they see. The Wings’ Executive Leadership Team, including Duran, has successfully created such an environment at the credit union.

Balancing Regulatory Compliance and Member Interests

According to Duran, navigating heightened regulatory scrutiny begins with understanding organizational risk appetite. She describes risk appetite as less of a science and more of an art. Its objective is not to eliminate risk, as that would be neither realistic nor conducive to innovation. Instead, leaders must understand the risks they face and determine which ones they can accept and those that must be mitigated.

“Risk is always doublesided. There's opportunity, and there's risk, and we need to be able to navigate both sides.”

For credit unions, there is another dimension. They must act responsibly for the benefit of their members. Duran, therefore, starts and ends each day asking, “What is the right thing to do for the member?”

Regulatory compliance and member interests are often aligned. However, where there is room for judgment, she believes decisions should be guided by what best serves members.

Innovating Within Guardrails

Technology is making the balance between regulatory compliance and credit union member interests increasingly complex.

Artificial intelligence is a clear example. AI presents enormous innovation opportunities for financial institutions. But it also introduces information security, operational, privacy, and decision-making risks.

The answer, Duran believes, is not to choose between innovation and risk management, but for both to move together. This is why she considers enterprise security and risk management as inseparable from a credit union’s approach to innovation.

At Wings, Duran and her team have been focused on establishing governance principles for AI adoption. As a new Chief of AI and Innovation takes the helm at Wings, Duran sees risk’s role as creating guardrails within which innovation can move forward responsibly.

She predicts the challenge will only grow as AI becomes more capable. Financial institutions must contend with how they can use AI for good. They also need to be aware of how bad actors may use the same technology against them. The stakes are particularly high when member privacy and trust are involved.

Duran sees an emerging arms race in which institutions must become faster and more sophisticated in defending themselves while still finding productive uses for the technology. She believes the financial services industry cannot afford to become so afraid of risk that it stops evolving.

Risk, she argues, is inherently double-sided. Every opportunity carries potential exposure, but avoiding every exposure can create another kind of risk, that of irrelevance.

Choosing Curiosity Over Complacency

To maximize each opportunity in risk leadership, Duran’s advice to professionals entering the field is to stay curious.

Risk professionals need enough knowledge to ask the right questions, understand how an organization operates and recognize where potential problems may emerge. There is no single technical skill that can prepare someone for every challenge, as the risk landscape is constantly changing. Consequently, lifelong learning, openness and curiosity become the real tools of the profession.

A sense of curiosity is consistent with Duran’s risk leadership philosophy, with which she seeks to understand what is happening, ask the questions others may overlook and be willing to speak up when something is not right. At Wings, she applies that mindset to risk governance to help the organization move forward with its members’ trust intact.