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Steve Meirink is Executive VP and GM for Wolters Kluwer Compliance Solutions, a business within the Governance, Risk & Compliance division of this $5 billion company. Now in his seventh year at Wolters Kluwer, Meirink manages a team of 1,500 employees across 20 global locations and is responsible for the overall strategy and P&L for Compliance Solutions’ operating portfolio covering the banking, lending, insurance, and brokerage markets.
Since January 2020, Meirink has overseen exponential growth for Compliance Solutions, despite the severe impacts and displacements that COVID presented to Wolters Kluwer, to its banking clients, and to the overall global economy. In December 2020, he presided over the successful completion of a major, $280 million acquisition of the industry-leading digital lending platform, eOriginal. In March 2022, Compliance Solutions announced a $70 billion acquisition of International Document Services, reflecting the business’ continuing upward trajectory and strategy to further enhance its operational and technology capabilities in the digital lending space.
Meirink’s success in building a robust, high-growth Compliance Solutions business led in August 2021 to the announcement that it was integrating a separate Wolters Kluwer business unit, Lien Solutions, to further leverage the synergies of both business’ product platforms, innovation roadmap, and customer base. These actions have complemented the efforts of Meirink and his team to further nourish and expand a growing enterprise, which focuses on helping financial institutions manage risk and regulatory compliance obligations through the delivery of expert solutions, advisory services, AI-enriched regulatory content, and technology platforms that simplify and secure operational workflows, processes and transactions in a compliant, transparent manner.
These achievements have, collectively, spawned a highly motivated and engaged employee workforce. The Compliance Solutions business consistently scores well above the industry standard (73) of high-performing U.S. companies, and it achieved in the most recent company employee engagement survey (2022) a score five points above that same industry milestone. Headquartered in Minneapolis, the business was named to the 2021 Star Tribune Top Workplaces list. Meirink has overseen steady progress in Compliance Solutions’ achievements in continuous process improvements, product innovation, customer service excellence, executive leadership recognitions, and best places to work accolades that generated a total of 44 major industry awards in 2020 and, in 2021, grew to 52 major awards. These accolades include Finance Monthly magazine’s 2021 FinTech Awards, Launch of the Year, for Compliance Solutions’ OneSumX Proviso, an AI-driven, expert-curated co-creation with one of the nation’s Top Five banks to help manage the massive amount of regulatory changes facing banks and other financial institutions today.
Most notably, Meirink drove, directed and oversaw a massive, business unit-wide effort during the height of the pandemic to leverage Compliance Solutions’ lending technology, enabling it to help banks across the country expedite emergency Paycheck Protection Program loan applications through the Small Business Administration, which provided critical funding to help businesses keep their doors open and workers employed.
The initiative embraced the rapid development and deployment of a customized lending software for banks, called TSoftPlus, and drove a 4,000 percent jump in the number of Paycheck Protection Program loans that Wolters Kluwer client lenders were able to process—compared to pre-pandemic numbers—to benefit CARES Act small business recipients nationally.
The effort was an outstanding demonstration of product innovation, optimal business follow-through, and what Meirink calls “peak employee discretionary effort.” Compliance Solutions’ technology teams quickly scaled both the necessary infrastructure and software applications—from 10-15 lender transactions/day to a peak of 17,000 transactions/day, fueled by a 200x increase in concurrent users. Team members worked days, nights and weekends to quickly add additional servers, continually update and optimize software code, and reduce performance bottlenecks.
Through this collective team effort, Compliance Solutions expeditiously delivered a PPP lending solution to a wide array of banks nationally, helping save over one million U.S. small business workers’ jobs. Accordingly, in late 2021 Meirink was named Executive of the Year in Financial Technology by CEO Monthly magazine.
