My contribution to a board
I would bring a board three things from a career spent writing what financial companies tell their customers. The first is a working knowledge of how regulated communication fails. It rarely fails through a false statement. It fails through a true one placed where a reader will misunderstand it, a payment structure that rewards the wrong claim or an algorithm that quietly decides who sees an offer. I can read a company's customer communication, complaints and marketing controls and tell a board where its next problem is likely to start.
The second is experience of communication in a confidence event at a listed company, under disclosure obligations, with a general counsel checking every figure. Boards rehearse cyber incidents and liquidity stress, but they rarely rehearse a week in which customers rather than investors move first. I can help a board ask whether management has its facts ready, who can stop the advertising and who calls whom on the first day.
The third is a marketer's knowledge of measurement. I know how acquisition costs, retention curves and brand tracking are built, and where they flatter the people presenting them.
I would not offer myself as a financial expert for an audit committee, or as a technology or cyber specialist. My natural place is a risk committee, a nominating and governance committee or, where a board has one, a committee on customers and reputation. I would expect to serve a full year as a member before chairing any of them.
Judgement in practice
01Persuading a chief executive not to tell customers their money was safe
On 13 March 2023 our chief executive and chief financial officer wanted a reassurance campaign, and I had about forty minutes before the executive committee met. Rather than argue about tone, I brought the draft headline with the three questions a depositor holding US$900,000 would ask on reading it, and our general counsel's view of the FDIC's rules on misrepresenting deposit insurance. I also brought what we would do instead, with a time for each step, so that the committee was choosing between two plans rather than between action and silence. It chose the facts page. On a board I would apply the same discipline to management's proposals: ask what the most frightened or least informed reader will conclude, and ask for management's alternative before accepting that there is none.
02Declaring my own directorship before a partnership decision
In 2024, when Ledgemoor chose housing counselling agencies to partner with on mortgage outreach, one candidate was Ardell Street Housing Trust, where I have been an unpaid director since 2022. I declared the directorship to our general counsel before the shortlist was drawn up, left the selection to our fair-lending officer and community-development team, and stayed out of the Trust's own board discussion of the partnership. Ardell was chosen alongside two other agencies, and the arrangement sits in our conflicts register, reviewed each year. I took two lessons from it. Declaring early costs nothing and declaring late costs credibility. And a recusal is only real if the person who stepped back does not quietly shape the brief.
03Asking a venture-backed board to accept a smaller growth plan
At Quillmark in August 2020 I asked a board whose investors valued the company largely on account growth to accept a plan that would fall about 140,000 accounts short. I set out the cost before the benefit: the accounts we would lose, the higher acquisition cost and the creators who would leave. Our chief compliance officer then explained the regulatory exposure. One investor director argued for keeping per-account payments with tighter review. I answered that review could not undo what the payment told creators to say. The board voted for the change. I learnt that a board accepts a cost it can see more readily than a risk it must imagine, and that a director's most useful question is often which number management is protecting.
My first year on a board
I would spend my first year learning the company through its customers before forming views about its strategy.
In the first three months I would read two years of complaints data, the customer communications that generate the most calls and the board papers on reputation and conduct. I would ask to see three pieces of customer-facing material exactly as a customer receives them, including one that management regards as routine. I would meet the chair, the general counsel, the chief risk officer and whoever leads marketing and customer service, and put the same question to each of them: what would we tell customers on our worst morning, and who would tell them?
From the fourth month I would attend a full cycle of the committees I had joined and say less than I wanted to. If I saw a risk that could not wait, such as advertising that made a claim the company could not support, I would take it to the committee chair privately before raising it in the room.
At the end of the year I would ask the chair two questions: whether my contributions had helped the board understand its customers, and whether my banking background had narrowed my view of a different business. If the honest answer to the second was yes, I would want to hear it then rather than at my reappointment.
Conflicts and their management
Ledgemoor comes first. Any directorship would need our chief executive's written consent and a review by our general counsel before I accepted it, and I would ask a company for its conflict questionnaire before an offer rather than after one.
I can foresee four kinds of conflict. Competitors: I would not join a bank, credit union, mortgage lender, brokerage, payments company or fintech lender operating in Wisconsin, Illinois or Minnesota, or any firm competing nationally for our deposits. Commercial ties: I would not join a company that is a significant borrower from, depositor with or supplier to Ledgemoor, and I would disclose any smaller relationship. Advertising suppliers: I would disclose any agency, research firm or data vendor that serves both organisations and step out of decisions involving them. My existing seat: Ardell Street Housing Trust receives a counselling grant and referrals from Ledgemoor, which I would declare to any board I joined.
If a conflict arose during a term, I would tell the chair before the meeting, leave the room for the item and check that the minutes recorded it. If that happened more than occasionally, I would resign rather than hold a seat in which I could not take part. Nothing I know about Ledgemoor's customers, pricing or advertising performance would enter another board's discussion, however relevant it seemed.
My independence statement
I am a full-time executive of a listed bank and would remain one. A board considering me should test my independence against its exchange's listing standards with everything in front of it: my employment, my Ledgemoor shares and deferred awards, my unpaid directorship of Ardell Street Housing Trust, which receives a counselling grant and referrals from Ledgemoor, and any commercial tie between Ledgemoor and the company, its executives or its agencies. That judgement belongs to the board. I would not describe myself as independent until it had been made.
Board and committee exposure
Served as a director
Ardell Street Housing Trust
Board of directors; chair of the lending programme committee from 2024; member of the finance committee
March 2022–present
Unpaid director of a Milwaukee nonprofit that provides homebuyer counselling and small down-payment loans; chairs the committee that sets lending criteria and reviews loan performance.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Ledgemoor Financial Corporation
Board risk committee
2021–present
Presents twice a year on advertising review, withdrawals after launch and the census-tract delivery of credit advertising.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Ledgemoor Financial Corporation
Full board
March–June 2023
Reported on customer communication during the deposit outflows, including the suspension of advertising, the facts page and the calling programme.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Quillmark Investing
Board of directors
2018–2021
Presented annual brand and acquisition plans and, in August 2020, the proposal to end per-account payments to finance creators.