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Polly Klane was nearly eight years into her second tenure at Capital One when she received a call from Citizens Financial Group. She had built quite the résumé as a long-standing deputy general counsel at Capital One, with a total of nearly seventeen years at the company and various promotions.
There had been other calls for roles that were just not the right fit. “I liked my job at Capital One, so my bar was high,” Klane says.
But this call was different. Citizens was a respected regional bank in her own backyard. Upon connecting with the recruiter and CEO Bruce Van Saun, she could see herself at the company from both a cultural and business perspective.
And this was her chance to step into the general counsel seat.
In April 2022, Klane joined Citizens Financial Group as its general counsel and chief legal officer, excited to be part of Van Saun’s vision for growth and innovation. “I loved that Bruce wanted to find places where we could distinguish ourselves and win with customers,” she says. “That was the culture I’d grown up in and what I was looking for.”
Klane and her ninety-person department handle all legal issues the company faces. Her department also oversees three nonlegal functions: regulatory relations, government relations, and subpoena processing.
“Let the business focus on building a great business and let [legal] worry about the problems.”
Polly Klane
Regulatory relations manages the relationships with the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as the examination activity of those regulators. Government relations manages the relationships with elected officials across the states Citizens operates in and with federal banking and financial services committees. Subpoena processing deals with cases involving personal or business financial records.
For Klane, the role of legal department is twofold. The first is managing risk, particularly on the litigation side. “I’m trying to have our team take on and think about some of the problems that can otherwise be quite distracting to the business,” she explains. “Let the business focus on building a great business and let us worry about the problems.”
The legal department also advises on products, initiatives, and marketing. “Our job is to give the business the advice they need to do it right,” Klane says. “It’s important to do it right not only because it’s ethical but also because it creates a long-term resilient business, particularly when you have a customer-facing franchise.”
It’s this second piece that allows Klane to help drive the business and its transformation from the legal seat. In September 2024, Citizens Financial Group celebrates the ten-year anniversary of its IPO—one of the largest-ever banking IPOs. The IPO brought in $3 billion for RBS, which acquired Citizens in 1988.
Though Klane was not at the company for those initial years, she credits Van Saun and the team for setting the foundation for today’s successes. “I got to arrive just as that platform was ready to do these exciting things,” she says.
“We don’t have sharp elbows here. We’re trying to work together to build the business.”
Polly Klane
That foundation has paved the way for Citizens’ expansion in the New York metro, with sixty-six locations after the acquisition of HSBC branches in 2022 and the acquisition of Investors in 2023. It also positioned the bank to find opportunities after the private banking disruption in March 2023.
“We were doing more than surviving,” Klane says. “We had a strong balance sheet. We could weather that storm and then lean into an opportunity gap in the market in private banking and private wealth that we saw appearing following the collapse of SVB [Silicon Valley Bank] and FRB [First Republic Bank].”
As general counsel, Klane’s top priorities are recruiting, retaining, and developing talent. The legal work is important, but it does not come together without the right people in place.
Once the talent is in place, it’s time to lead. Trust and transparency are number one for Klane, followed by leading with optimism to foster positive problem-solving. The third is being comfortable with being challenged by the team—and encouraging that challenge.
“Our role as a team is to deliver the best advice to our businesses, so we need to be best as a team,” she explains. “I don’t need the best answer to come from me . . . the best answer can come from so many different places.”
That collaborative spirit is what drew Klane to Citizens in the first place: the commitment to working together to problem-solve and move the business forward.
“We don’t have sharp elbows here,” she says. “We’re trying to work together to build the business.”
“Polly has an uncanny ability to cut through the noise of complex problems, focus on what matters and find optimal and business-oriented solutions. She’s a formidable leader and great teammate. We are lucky to work with her.”
–Lee Armstrong, Partner
