Leonard Lapidus

Leonard Lapidus is a consultant in banking, bank regulation, and deposit insurance, specializing in financial sector reform in economies-in-transition and in emerging nations.  Since 1999 he has done financial sector reform work in Nicaragua, Iraq, Colombia, Senegal, Bosnia, and Romania, as an independent consultant under contract with the US Treasury.  From 1995 to 1999 he was Associate Director for Financial Institutions in the Office of Technical Assistance of the United States Treasury.  In that post he provided advice to, and recruited and managed advisors for, governments of the economies-in-transition in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union, and governments of emerging nations elsewhere in the world, to help them, reform and privatize their banking systems.

He specializes in deposit insurance.  In 2000-2001 he and Neil Murphy designed a deposit insurance scheme for Thailand under the auspices of the World Bank and the Bank of Thailand.  He advised a number of Central Banks and Bank Regulatory and Supervsory agencies in emerging and transitional economies on deposit insurance matters in the last 12 years.

Before that, for 14 years he was President of the Mutual Savings Central Fund which insures the deposits of savings banks in Massachusetts and provides loans to the banks for liquidity purposes.

He was President of the Central Liquidity Facility (CLF) of the National Credit Union Administration, a liquidity lender to credit unions and Director of that Agency's Office of the Insurance Fund from 1979 to 1981. 

From 1977 to 1979 he was Special Assistant to the Chairman of the FDIC and just prior was New York State's Acting Superintendent of Banks, after having served as First Deputy Superintendent.

Prior to his joining the Banking Department, he was a Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Mr. Lapidus is the author of a number of papers on banking and its regulation and directed two major studies on bank regulation for regulatory agencies.

Mr. Lapidus holds a Ph.D. degree in economics from New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.