Malcolm GrantChief Human Resources Officer · Essays & perspective
Portrait of Malcolm Grant
Malcolm Grant
Chief Human Resources Officer · United States

A selected perspective

Incentive design and conduct5 min read

The instructions inside a bank's people decisions

A shorter points table still tells a banker that the next product is the job. Branch pay should be funded by what customers are still using months later, and the people who investigate sales misconduct should help design it.

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The portfolio

From idea to consequence.

I

Taking product points out of the branch incentive plan

In 2023 Callowmere paid 2,900 branch colleagues through a points table covering fourteen products, while the Kelverdine branches we were acquiring paid their teams on shared results.

View the case study ↗
II

A retention pool built from names rather than salary grades

When Callowmere agreed in February 2023 to acquire Kelverdine Bank, our advisers proposed a US$38 million retention pool for roughly 600 Kelverdine employees above a defined salary grade.

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III

Answering a 68% say-on-pay vote

At our 2024 annual meeting, 68% of votes cast supported our executive pay, compared with 94% the year before.

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I judge a bank's people decisions by what they ask a teller, a collector or a relationship manager to do when nobody senior is watching. A pay plan, a promotion slate or a branch roster is an instruction, whatever the covering memo says. My work is to make those instructions agree with the bank the board believes it is running, and to say so plainly when they do not.

The journal

Further reading.

  1. 02

    Hybrid work in control functions5 min read

    Hybrid work in a bank's control functions is a training decision

    Arguments about office attendance in compliance, risk and audit usually turn on productivity or culture. The better question is how a junior analyst learns to challenge a business line, and how much of that learning depends on being in the room.

  2. 03

    Succession for regulated roles5 min read

    An emergency name in the binder is not a successor for a control role

    Banks usually record an acting successor for each critical control role. Boards should instead ask for evidence that the person has already done a meaningful part of the job, and accept the cost of the assignments that produce that evidence.

Colleagues
11,600
Callowmere Financial Corporation, June 2026
Annual compensation and benefits expense
US$1.38bn
Enterprise-wide, 2025; not the HR operating budget
Critical roles with evidenced successors
14 of 17
Board-designated roles, 2026

I read every pay plan, promotion slate and branch roster as an instruction to the people who will follow it, and I hold the bank to what that instruction actually says.

I am executive vice president and chief human resources officer of Callowmere Financial Corporation, a listed bank holding company in Richmond, Virginia, with 392 branches across five south-eastern states. In October 2023 we completed the acquisition of Kelverdine Bank of Knoxville, bringing 4,300 colleagues into a company of 7,600. I am responsible for reward, talent, succession, employee relations and HR operations for 11,600 people and US$1.38 billion of annual compensation and benefits expense. I report to our chief executive, Corinne Ashdale, and prepare the materials our board's compensation committee uses to oversee executive and incentive pay.

My first job, in 1992, was as a management trainee at Pellingham Savings Bank in eastern Pennsylvania. I was running one of its branches when Ravensholt Bank acquired it in 1999, so I learnt about mergers from the side that receives the new policy manual. As a district manager I later found accounts in my own branches that customers had never used, and the review that followed moved me into incentive design. I then led compensation and HR work at Ravensholt and at Orrinford Payments, a card business, before joining Callowmere in 2021.

Three questions have occupied me since. How do two banks become one employer without pretending their habits were identical? How should a bank pay the people who open accounts, collect debts and approve credit, so that it rewards what customers keep rather than what they are sold? And who, by name and by evidence, could step into the roles our board and supervisors depend on most? My answers have cost money, some sales volume and at least one argument I lost.

A branch plan without product points

In 2024 we replaced a fourteen-product points table for 2,900 branch colleagues with a team plan funded partly by accounts still active at ninety days. Complaints about unrequested products fell from 312 to 41 a year, while new checking accounts fell 9%.

Retention aimed at named people, not grades

For the Kelverdine integration I argued for a US$14.6 million pool covering 212 named colleagues instead of a US$38 million grade-based pool. At twenty-four months 191 remained, and acquired commercial client attrition was 4% against the 11% in the deal model.

Successors who have already done part of the job

Fourteen of the seventeen roles our board designates as critical now have a successor with recorded acting or rotational experience, compared with six when we introduced that standard in 2023.

Redeployment before reduction

As automation removed about 310 roles' worth of operations work, we gave nine months' notice and paid retraining. Of 642 colleagues affected, 194 moved into new internal roles and 55 took severance; the savings arrived two quarters late.

Current focus

I am working on the 2027 incentive plan for our commercial bank, where relationship managers are still paid partly on new loan volume while the credit risk stays on the balance sheet for years after the bonus. I am also refining attendance for compliance, risk and internal audit so that junior analysts still learn to challenge a business line.

Conversations I welcome

I am not seeking another executive appointment. I would consider one non-executive role, ideally on a compensation committee, in an organisation that neither competes with nor borrows from Callowmere, subject to my chief executive's consent and a conflict review. I accept a few advisory and speaking conversations a year.

Beyond the page

The record behind the perspective.

In the boardroom

  • Tredway Workforce AllianceDirector; chair of the personnel committee · April 2022–present

Formation

  • Bachelor of Arts in economicsWendmoor College · 1992
  • Master of Science in human resource management (part-time)Carrow Point University · 2004
After the 2024 vote, Malcolm came to me before the committee met and said the integration awards had been his recommendation and the wrong one. Most of what the committee did well that year followed from that conversation.
Lionel BrackwaterChair, compensation committee, Callowmere Financial Corporation
The full record ↗

Contact

I am not seeking another executive appointment. I would consider one non-executive role, ideally on a compensation committee, in an organisation that neither competes with nor borrows from Callowmere, subject to my chief executive's consent and a conflict review. I accept a few advisory and speaking conversations a year.

  • Board appointments
  • Advisory roles
  • Speaking invitations
Write to Malcolm Contact page