Todd H. Baker
Todd Baker is a financial services executive whose career has led him from corporate law to C-suite strategic business leadership roles at several of the largest domestic and international banks and roles as an academic, consultant, writer, speaker and commentator on banking, financial technology, consumer financial access and regulation issues.
He is currently the Managing Principal at Broadmoor Consulting, LLC, which provides strategic consulting services to CEOs of fintech and financial services companies at all stages of development. As a Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center, he works on issues arising from the digital transformation of financial services, with a special interest in emerging business models for both traditional banks and non-bank fintech financial services providers. Mr. Baker is a board member at the Opportunity Fund, the nation’s leading nonprofit small business lender, a member of the Academic Research Council at the Urban Institute and a senior advisor to several financial technology firms. Mr. Baker has written for publications including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and American Banker, speaks frequently at industry conferences, and is widely quoted in the financial and technology press as an industry expert.
Mr. Baker had a 14-year career as the chief corporate strategy and development officer at three large domestic and international retail, commercial and corporate banking organizations: MUFG Americas Holdings/Union Bank, TD Bank, and Washington Mutual. In those executive roles he managed, at various times, strategic and financial planning, acquisitions and divestitures, investor relations, performance management, venture capital investing and competitive intelligence and successfully led many large acquisitions and divestitures on behalf of his employers.
Prior to his business roles, Mr. Baker was a San Francisco–based corporate partner with the international law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Morrison & Foerster, where he represented management and boards in all manner of corporate matters and led scores of large-scale M&A transactions and financings involving banks, technology companies, finance companies, mortgage lenders, credit card companies, savings banks, commercial lenders, and investment firms. His clients included, among others, BankAmerica Corp., Transamerica Corp., Intel, Montgomery Securities, Hewlett- Packard, First Nationwide Financial, Washington Mutual Inc., Global Center, Nomura Securities, Lehman Brothers, Visa International, CIBC, and Security Pacific Corp.
Mr. Baker has also been a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research interests and published papers at Harvard include work on the role of fintech and employers in providing alternatives to payday loans and other types of short-term, small-dollar credit for low-income working Americans in the digital age. Mr. Baker is a graduate of Dartmouth College (BA ’1978) and Stanford Law School (JD ’1981). He has served as a director of several performing arts organizations and is currently a member of the Ambassadors’ Council for Public Radio International.