What the credit file could not tell me

I first understood the difference between an account balance and available cash while reviewing a small distributor's borrowing request. The sales ledger looked healthy, but the oldest receivables belonged to customers who were themselves waiting to be paid. The owner did not need another lecture about working capital. He needed a bank that could separate a timing problem from a business model that no longer worked. I was a junior analyst and did not decide the facility. I did learn to ask questions that a polished application had left unanswered.

I had completed my commerce degree at Bellanore Institute of Business in June 1995 and joined Cairnfield Mercantile Bank that August. My first four years involved inventory schedules, security records and visits with experienced lending officers. The useful lessons were rarely dramatic. A warehouse count differed from the report. A guarantor had obligations elsewhere. A customer described seasonal trading in terms that did not match the cash movements. I became careful about the distance between what a document said and what a business could actually do.

In July 1999 I moved to Merevane Bank as a credit portfolio manager. The remit grew from individual applications to the behaviour of a book of commercial loans. Several apparently unrelated borrowers depended on the same construction cycle. Their legal identities were separate; their capacity to repay was not. I helped build a connected-exposure review that combined credit information with relationship managers' knowledge of customers and suppliers. It was imperfect and sometimes late. It also gave me an enduring reason to distrust diversification claims that rely only on industry codes.

My promotion to regional corporate banking director in 2005 put me on the other side of the lending discussion. I was responsible for winning business, developing relationship managers and delivering an acceptable return. Credit colleagues were entitled to expect more from me than reminders of my earlier discipline. We had real commercial choices to make. I declined a proposed expansion into distant property lending, then had to explain the missed income to a regional team whose remuneration depended partly on growth. I learnt that a boundary without a credible alternative is usually experienced as obstruction.

At Tarnwick Credit Group, where I became chief commercial officer in January 2011, I worked with a more concentrated specialist lender. The attraction was the opportunity to rebuild the connection between origination and servicing. Our customers often made complex machinery purchases or financed receivables with uneven collection patterns. An approved facility did not complete the job. Documentation, drawdown conditions and subsequent monitoring determined whether the original credit view survived contact with everyday trading. I moved experienced commercial staff into servicing improvement work and accepted slower expansion while we cleared accumulated exceptions.

Fennervale Commercial Bank recruited me as chief operating officer in September 2016. The bank had grown through regional relationships, and its customers valued access to people who knew their businesses. That strength could conceal inconsistent execution. A request might be resolved through personal intervention in one branch and sit without an owner in another. I did not want to replace judgement with scripts. We created a common record of unresolved work, retained local accountability and gave staff permission to surface recurring failures without waiting for an unhappy customer to escalate them.

Becoming chief executive in April 2021 widened my responsibility from delivery to the whole bank's choices. I report to the board and lead 1,740 colleagues through a twelve-person executive team. Our June 2026 balance sheet comprises C$18.6 billion of assets, including C$10.4 billion in loans, funded in part by C$13.2 billion of customer deposits. Those numbers describe scale, not a personal accomplishment. What matters to me is whether the assets, funding and operating capacity form a business we can explain under pressure.

The most difficult conversations in my current role concern costs we incur before a problem becomes visible. Diversifying deposits increased our funding expense. Reducing a connected credit concentration limited new lending to some existing customers. Testing recovery arrangements interrupted work that had its own deadlines. I have made mistakes in the sequencing of those changes. In particular, I initially underestimated how much explanation relationship managers needed before they could discuss a revised policy credibly with a long-standing customer.

I now spend more time with the people who must translate a board decision into a practical conversation. I ask them to describe the awkward exceptions, the incentives we have overlooked and facts they cannot establish. My executive colleagues are expected to bring disagreements into the room while a decision is still reversible. I do not regard a quiet meeting as evidence of alignment. The useful test is whether someone can challenge my interpretation and still leave with clear responsibility for the work we have agreed.

Outside my executive responsibilities, I am building a selective board contribution around commercial banking, financial infrastructure and service resilience. I would bring the experience of owning a balance sheet and running the operations that support it. I would also bring limits: I am not an actuary, a specialist technology architect or a substitute for independent legal advice. A nomination conversation should make those limits as visible as my experience. That is the standard I would want applied to any colleague whose judgement I was being asked to trust.