Projects — Finance Leadership
Cost Savings.
The most valuable work a finance department does is rarely about building something new. It's questioning numbers everyone else has stopped looking at. Money hides in two places — assumptions nobody revisits, and contracts nobody reconciles.
Reserves eliminated — one-time adjustment
Ongoing savings — annually, in perpetuity
Revenue leak plugged — over four years
The rewards reserve nobody questioned.
Every point a cardholder earns is a promise — someday they'll redeem it, and it will cost us real money. So the balance sheet carries a reserve for all the points outstanding. Reasonable in principle. The trouble is that reserves like this grow on autopilot: the assumptions underneath get set once, then inherited year after year by people who assume someone before them did the math.
So I did the math. A full review of how points were earned, how cardholders actually redeemed them, and what portion of the outstanding balance would realistically ever be claimed. Rebuilt from real cardholder behavior instead of inherited assumptions, the conclusion was plain — the reserve was overstated by more than $2 million. We released it as a one-time adjustment. That's not found money; it's a balance sheet finally telling the truth.
Then the part I'm prouder of: a one-time win is a headline, a structural fix is an annuity. The program had no boundaries — points never expired and could pile up without limit. Two simple design changes — a cap and an expiration date — gave every point a defined life and a defined ceiling. That single policy change saves more than $1 million a year. Not once. Every year, in perpetuity.
The interchange leak.
Interchange is the fee that flows back to the card issuer every time a cardholder swipes. Individually it's pennies; across millions of transactions it's one of the largest non-interest income lines there is — and pennies at scale is exactly where leaks hide. Nobody calls to tell you they're underpaying you. If you don't reconcile what you're actually paid against what your contracts say, you're trusting arithmetic done entirely by the party writing the check.
We ran that reconciliation. A detailed analysis of interchange income against the terms of our network and processor contracts showed the two didn't match — a gap that compounded quietly into more than $6 million of lost revenue over four years. Once we could show the leak line by line, we took it to the negotiating table and restructured the contracts to plug it.
And we protected the upside while we were there. Milestone bonuses — payments earned as the portfolio grows — are exactly what the other side likes to quietly rework in a renegotiation. We kept ours tied to both dollar growth and transaction volume: two independent ways to earn, so the institution gets paid whether growth shows up as bigger tickets or more swipes.
No new products. No headcount cuts. No consultants. No heroics.
The $2 million was sitting in an estimate everyone trusted. The $6 million was sitting in contracts everyone assumed were being honored. Combined, that's more than $8 million surfaced by disciplined review — plus another $1 million-plus that keeps arriving every year, because we fixed the structure, not just the number.
The next opportunity like these is sitting in a number everybody trusts. Go find it.
Sound familiar?
If your institution has reserves nobody has challenged or income lines nobody has reconciled lately, this is the kind of review I do.