Allen Puwalski serves as a Director of Flagstar Bank, N.A. In addition to chairing the Risk Assessment Committee, he is a member of the Audit and Compensation Committees.
Mr. Puwalski started his 30-year career in banking as a field examiner and capital markets specialist for the FDIC in its New York region following the Commercial Real Estate crisis of the late 1980s. When he left the FDIC in 2004, he was the Chief of Bank Analysis in the FDIC’s Division of Insurance and was managing the analysis, publications, and policy development of a 15-person multi-disciplinary team of PhD economists, CPAs, CFAs, and commissioned bank examiners. The substantive work of this group included bank failure projection modeling, early development of bank stress testing, and the quantitative justification for risk-based deposit insurance pricing.
After several years as global financial sector team lead for CFRA, an independent research firm specializing in forensic accounting research and analytics, Mr. Puwalski joined Paulson and CO in 2007 as the fund’s first financials sector specialist. At Paulson, Allen executed complex transactions with high returns across the full capital structure, in both liquid and PE-style investing, U.S. and Europe. Mr. Puwalski was also a director at OneWest Bank, N.A. prior to its sale to CIT Group in 2015.
Allen headed community bank strategy for SoFi Technologies during its bank chartering and listing process. At present, Mr. Puwalski is a founding partner of Cybiont Capital, LLC, a company specializing in fundamental bank analysis and advising in community bank investing.
Mr. Puwalski earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and certificate of finance from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and he is a chartered financial analyst (CFA).