The branch manager who started reading pay plans closely

I learnt how a bank's instructions reach its front line by being on the receiving end of them. In 1997 I was managing the Easton branch of Pellingham Savings Bank in Pennsylvania, with eleven colleagues and about US$90 million in deposits. That spring the bank introduced a quarterly bonus for each additional product a customer took. Nobody told us to open accounts people did not want. The table simply paid more for a second savings account than for an hour spent explaining why a customer's mortgage escrow had changed. Within two quarters my most capable teller was spending her lunch break calling customers about debit cards. I saw nothing wrong with that at the time, which is the part of the story I now find most useful.

I had joined Pellingham as a management trainee in July 1992, two months after finishing an economics degree at Wendmoor College. The programme rotated me through deposit operations, consumer lending and the counter, and I became a branch manager in 1995. When Ravensholt Bank acquired Pellingham in April 1999, I was offered a district role covering sixteen former Pellingham branches in the Lehigh Valley. I spent the next eighteen months converting them to Ravensholt's systems, products and sales practices. I watched colleagues who had exercised judgement for years receive a manual that assumed they had none. Fourteen of my sixteen branch managers stayed through the conversion. The two who left were among the strongest, and both told me the manual was the reason.

Ravensholt's sales culture was more intense than Pellingham's. In 2003 I noticed that several of my branches had unusually high numbers of secondary checking accounts with no activity after their first month. I sampled the files with a branch operations officer and found accounts that customers had not used and, in a small number of cases, did not recognise when we telephoned them. I reported the finding to my regional executive expecting an argument. Instead I was asked to join a review of the consumer bank's incentives, at first alongside my district and then, from January 2005, as the director responsible for redesigning them. I had finished a part-time master's degree in human resource management at Carrow Point University the previous summer, studying in the evenings with no plan to leave the branches. The review changed that.

My first redesign was a compromise. We cut the points table from twenty-two products to nine, required an account to be funded within sixty days before it earned anything and introduced monthly quality reviews by branch managers. Complaints about disputed accounts fell by more than half, and I believed the problem had been solved. It had been reduced. A points table, however short, still tells a banker that the next product is the job. It took me most of the following two decades, and a second look at a different bank's plan, to say that plainly.

From August 2010 I led compensation and performance for the whole of Ravensholt. After the financial crisis the federal banking agencies had made clear that incentive arrangements at banks should balance risk and reward, fit with effective controls and be overseen by the board. In practice that meant knowing what we paid for. We found sixty-three separate incentive plans, several of which nobody in HR had seen, and reduced them to twenty-one with one approval route and a review by the chief risk officer's team. I also prepared the compensation committee's materials for Ravensholt's first advisory say-on-pay vote in 2011. Writing for directors taught me to put the choice in front of them on the first page, rather than the history of how management arrived at it.

In June 2016 I moved to Orrinford Payments, the card and merchant-payments business of a listed financial group, to lead HR for its card and payments businesses. Most of its people worked in contact centres in Delaware, Arizona and South Dakota. Collectors there were paid partly on dollars recovered each month, which created a quiet pressure to steer customers in hardship away from repayment programmes that reduced the immediate payment. We changed the plan so that a correctly placed hardship arrangement counted as a resolution, and paired the change with call reviews by compliance. In March 2020 we moved 3,100 contact-centre colleagues to home working in six weeks. That taught me that hybrid policy is a design question about particular work, not a statement of corporate values.

I joined Callowmere in March 2021. Two years later we agreed to acquire Kelverdine Bank, and the integration has shaped my work since. Kelverdine's branch teams were paid as teams; ours were paid on product points. Kelverdine's commercial bankers held more local credit authority than ours. I argued that some Kelverdine practices were better and should become the combined bank's, and I lost about as many of those arguments as I carried. We kept Kelverdine's team-based branch pay and extended it across the network. We did not keep its credit authority, which our chief credit officer harmonised within a year for reasons I came to accept.

I work best with colleagues who are prepared to disagree in writing. Every incentive proposal I take to our compensation committee carries a page signed by the conduct-risk team, and I attach the objections I did not accept. I would rather a director read the argument than discover it later. Inside HR I ask for the evidence behind a readiness rating, the ninety-day activity behind an account count and the exit interviews behind a retention rate. People who have worked for me would say I ask what a measure will make someone do on a busy afternoon, that I am slow to announce a programme and that I am reluctant to call one finished.

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