A binder of corrections nobody had reported

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.

That binder has stayed with me. In August 2000, I joined Pembrevale Trust Company as a programmer analyst on the deposit system, a mainframe application in COBOL that calculated GIC interest and maturities. I learnt how estate officers, deposit clerks and accountants depended on it, and how often a request for a small change was really a request to remove a step someone performed every day. By 2004 I led three programmers. I also learnt that the person asking for a change was rarely the person doing the extra work.

In 2006 I moved to Calgary to join Tandercroft Systems, which sold mortgage-servicing software to trust companies and credit unions. As development manager for the servicing product, I led sixteen developers. Selling software to many lenders showed me the other side of the binder: each client kept a list of local adjustments, and our product plan rarely saw them. I began visiting client back offices with our product managers to watch renewals and payment changes being processed. Several of our most requested features turned out to be workarounds for data that brokers had supplied incompletely.

Payments came next. From 2011 I led payment integration at Quintrel Payment Services in Toronto, a processor connecting about ninety smaller banks, trust companies and credit unions to debit, ATM and electronic funds transfer networks. Our clients' ledgers mostly ran in batches while the networks increasingly expected answers in seconds. My team of thirty-eight built the interfaces between those two clocks. When something failed, an operations analyst at a small institution usually repaired it the next morning, and I learnt to count those repairs as part of the product's real cost.

In 2016 I joined Tellmarsh Cooperative Services in Regina as vice-president of banking platforms. The cooperative, owned by forty-one credit unions in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, ran a shared core banking system, card services and payment exchange for about 620,000 members. I reported to the chief executive, Brian Kowalchuk, and regularly to the board's technology and operations committee. Member credit unions were both customers and owners, and they disagreed openly. Some wanted new digital features; others wanted fewer manual reconciliations. I learnt to put both requests before the committee with their costs and let the owners choose, rather than pretend the backlog was a technical matter.

I returned to Pembrevale as chief technology officer in April 2021. The deposit ledger I had once programmed was still running, hosted by an outsourced provider since 2012, and the company had grown to C$9.8 billion of assets by the end of 2025. My first months were spent on the register of workarounds described on this site. It changed three significant decisions: the timing and scope of our core replacement, the way we verify income on broker mortgage files, and when we will connect to real-time payments. In each case someone with a good argument disagreed, and the cost of my position appears in the cases.

I am not the only person who reads the register. Operations managers own most entries, our chief risk officer, Anika Holmgren, uses it in operational-risk reviews, and internal audit has tested how we close items. Information security reports to me through our chief information security officer, who also has direct access to the risk committee chair. I present technology and cyber risk to that committee quarterly and attend the full board when a major programme needs approval. I am not a director of Pembrevale.

Outside work I have served since 2019 on the board of Wyndrell Housing Co-operative, a 112-unit co-operative in Winnipeg, where I sit on its finance committee. That role has taught me how a volunteer board weighs a reserve-fund study against residents' monthly charges, and how a director's question differs from an executive's answer.

I now want to bring the habit of that 1998 binder to a corporate board: asking what people do around a system before accepting what the system reports. I would do so as a committee member first, in a sector that does not compete with Pembrevale, and with enough humility to learn what a different company's people are absorbing on its behalf.

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