USD Magazine Spring 2020

[ p u r p o s e f u l ]

by Ray Decker R David Rei l ing is determined to be part of the solut ion H E ’ S B A N K I N G O N I T isk is something that David Reiling ’89 (BBA) has never been averse to. It’s a

think my luck would last,” he recalls, a hint of a shrug in his voice. Though his career trajecto- ry veered away from low-income neighborhoods, he never forgot the needs of the people who live and work in those communities. Long before terms like Changemaker and social entre- preneurship became part of his lexicon, service to others was in- grained in him. “I had a very pos- itive Catholic upbringing,” he says. “My time at USD was a wonderful extension of that.” As an undergraduate, he was part of a USD team of volunteers that built a home for a family in Tijuana. This experience had a

during five bank robberies. Those experiences might have caused the average person to consider looking for work in a different field, but not Reiling. “I thought it was exciting, between the money and the bank robberies” he says. “And I was always kind of fascinated with money and commerce and business.”

Reiling worked at branches in low-income, economically dis- tressed communities, first in his native St. Paul, Minnesota and then at a stint in South Central Los Angeles in the early ’90s, when the region was the bank robbery capital of the world. “It was a phenomenal learning experience, but the third time I had a gun to my head, I didn’t

word that’s often tossed around in the world of banking, but for Reiling, risk takes on deeper meaning than it might for the average bank chairman and CEO. His introduction to banking wasn’t for the faint of heart: Early in his career, he was present

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