Assistant Professor of Law and
Deputy Director of the Center for Banking and Finance
Graham Steele spent nearly two decades helping write the rules that govern America’s banks, including the federal government’s regulatory response to the 2008 financial crisis. Now he’s training the lawyers who will apply them.
Steele joined the UNC School of Law faculty in July 2026 as an assistant professor and deputy director of the Center for Banking and Finance. He came to the role after serving as assistant secretary for financial institutions at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where he oversaw regulation of the nation’s banks from November 2021 to January 2024. He previously worked as minority chief counsel for the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and directed the Corporations and Society Initiative at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. His scholarship and commentary have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the New York Times and Bloomberg Opinion.
Steele said the decision to move from practice into teaching came after years of watching newer staffers arrive in Congress and at federal agencies eager to learn the jobs he had already held. “I increasingly felt that a higher and better use for my time and my efforts is to be a person passing those experiences on to the next generation, so that they’ll be the ones going out and changing the world themselves,” said Steele.
That same drive to train others shows up in his approach to teaching. Rather than handing them answers, Steele pushes students to ask hard questions. It’s a habit he believes could have caught some of the risks that went unnoticed before 2008.
Finding a place to put that philosophy into practice led him to Carolina Law’s Center for Banking and Finance. “If you care about banking and financial law, there are few institutions in the country that you would want to be at more,” said Steele, citing the strength of the faculty, the center’s reputation within the industry and North Carolina’s standing as a historic center of American banking.
There, Steele is working alongside Professor Lissa Broome, the center’s founding director, to sustain and expand its role serving the financial services industry across North Carolina and beyond, including training for early-career bank compliance professionals. “It’s great to add Graham’s unique experience and skill set to our faculty,” Broome said. “His background in public service gives him an important perspective on financial regulation. I’m excited to work with him.”
The Center’s first Foundations of Bank Compliance program, a new offering for compliance professionals, ran October 7 through 22 in Charlotte.
