Raphael CampbellChief Technology Officer

Personal correspondence

The work our staff do around the system

Chief Technology Officer Canada

I measure a financial institution's technology by the manual work its people still do to make it right.

In the autumn of 1998, I spent three months reading date fields in the ledgers of eleven Manitoba credit unions. Norvassen Data Services, the Winnipeg bureau that had hired me two years earlier after my computer science degree at Brandholm University, ran their accounts in overnight batches on a shared mainframe. Our job was to find every place a two-digit year could misbehave in 2000. The most useful thing I found was not a date. It was a binder at one credit union listing seventeen corrections its staff made by hand each morning because a report had never matched the ledger. Nobody had told us. The code worked as written, and the people around it had quietly absorbed the difference.

Every recurring spreadsheet, rekeyed field and overnight correction tells me where our systems stopped matching the business. I would rather fund the removal of that work than add a channel on top of it. A financial institution's technology is only as dependable as the manual steps it quietly needs, so I count them, name their owners and report them beside each investment.

Trust company assets
C$9.8 bn
Pembrevale Trust Company at 31 December 2025; employer scale, not my budget
Technology budget I am accountable for
C$47 M
2026: C$32 million operating and C$15 million capital
Recurring manual workarounds on the register
212 → 104
Opened September 2021; count at June 2026
Weekly payment exceptions resolved by hand
340 → 88
Early 2025 compared with June 2026, after intraday posting

I fund the removal of the manual work hidden around a trust company's systems before I fund anything new on top of them.

I am chief technology officer of Pembrevale Trust Company, a federally regulated trust and loan company headquartered in Winnipeg. We lend residential mortgages arranged by brokers in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario, take deposits mainly as GICs sold through deposit brokers and our own website, and administer estates and personal trusts. At 31 December 2025 we held C$9.8 billion of assets and employed about 640 people. I lead 156 technology employees and contractors through five directors, with a 2026 budget of C$47 million, and I report to our chief executive, Lorraine Petrishyn.

I first worked at Pembrevale in 2000, writing COBOL for the deposit ledger that still runs our accounts on a hosted mainframe. Returning as CTO in 2021, I asked operations colleagues to list every task they performed because a system could not. The register reached 212 recurring workarounds: spreadsheets kept beside the ledger, broker data typed twice, telephone calls to confirm an employer, payment exceptions fixed by hand during the overnight batch. Each one was a cost, a fraud opening or a delay that no project plan showed.

That register now shapes our investment choices. We postponed a core-ledger contract until we knew which workarounds a new core would remove and which it would simply move. We required direct income verification on every broker mortgage file after altered documents reached our underwriters. We delayed connecting to Canada's planned real-time payment rail until exceptions no longer depended on a night shift. The count stood at 104 in June 2026. I report it to our board risk committee each quarter, beside cyber and resilience measures.

A core contract signed after the inventory

In 2021 a vendor offered a 12 per cent discount to sign a C$38 million core replacement by March 2022. We declined, extended our hosting contract at a cost of C$1.9 million and found that 131 of 212 workarounds began upstream of the ledger. The narrower contract signed in 2024 needs 46 interfaces instead of 81.

Altered documents stopped before funding

Direct verification of income and bank data on every broker application cut document-fraud losses on funded loans from C$2.9 million in 2022 to C$0.6 million in 2025. Median approval time rose from two business days to three, and broker submissions fell 8 per cent for two quarters.

Payment exceptions handled in daylight

Before connecting to a real-time rail, we automated the payment exceptions our overnight team resolved by hand. Weekly manual exceptions fell from 340 to 88. Our estate and trust business gave up early access; urgent estate payments go by same-day wire meanwhile.

Current focus

I am preparing the 2027 ledger conversion so that each remaining entry on the workaround register has an owner and either a removal date or a written reason to stay, and the risk committee sees that list first.

Conversations I welcome

I am open to a first corporate board seat on a risk or technology committee in insurance, pension administration, payments infrastructure or a public financial agency, with twenty-two days a year, subject to consent from my chief executive and board and to a conflict review against Pembrevale's lending and deposit markets.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

In the boardroom

  • Wyndrell Housing Co-operativeElected volunteer director · 2019–present

Formation

  • Bachelor of Science in computer scienceBrandholm University · 1996
  • Board governance programmeHalvecourt Institute of Governance · 2025
Raphael told the board we should let a discount lapse, and then showed us exactly what the delay would cost. When he brings a recommendation, the opposing case is already in the paper.
Lorraine PetrishynChief executive, Pembrevale Trust Company
The full record ↗

Contact

I am open to a first corporate board seat on a risk or technology committee in insurance, pension administration, payments infrastructure or a public financial agency, with twenty-two days a year, subject to consent from my chief executive and board and to a conflict review against Pembrevale's lending and deposit markets.

  • Board appointments
Write to Raphael Contact page