UPDATE: This story includes additional information from Ally’s announcement and more analysis from Vincent Caintic.
Ally Financial has made a flurry of changes to its leadership team, including naming a new chief risk officer and hiring a veteran bank executive to lead retail deposits and consumer payments.
The Detroit-based bank announced Wednesday that Stephanie Richard is succeeding Jason Schugel as chief risk officer. Richard is a member of Ally’s executive management team who most recently served as chief audit executive. Schugel, who became chief risk officer in 2018, will serve as an interim senior advisor before leaving Ally, the company said in a press release.
The changes, which also involve a new chief auditor, come nearly seven months into Michael Rhodes’ tenure as CEO of the $193 billion-asset company.
Rhodes, who
“In joining the company earlier this year, I partnered closely with the leadership team to take a fresh look at our leadership structure,” Rhodes said in the release. Subsequently, he added, “we have made some shifts to deliver increased value for our customers, employees and shareholders.”
Richard, who joined Ally in 1997, will be responsible for the company’s risk management function. She will continue to report to Rhodes and, in her new role, start reporting to the board of directors’ risk committee, a company spokesperson said Wednesday in an email.
Wednesday’s announcement marks the first large-scale management change on Rhodes’ watch. In September, Ally announced that Hope Mehlman, the chief legal officer, general counsel and corporate secretary at Discover Financial Services, would join Ally as chief legal and corporate affairs officer next month. Rhodes briefly served as Discover’s CEO earlier this year, leaving in the spring after Capital One Financial announced
Rhodes has been “putting in time evaluating” Ally, said Vincent Caintic, an analyst at BTIG. The slew of changes, and particularly the appointment of a new chief risk officer, could reflect Rhodes “getting his bearings and thinking about how he wants to run the company,” Caintic said in an interview.
Rhodes warned last month that “the next few quarters will be choppy.” During the third quarter, Ally wrote off 2.24% of retail car loans, up from 1.85% in the prior-year period.
Caintic said he expects Rhodes to lay out his strategic vision for Ally during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January, and that the financial guidance going forward could be conservative. Analysts will be paying attention to the bank’s net interest margin and losses in the auto book, he said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if 2025 is a transition year where they are really going to have to tighten underwriting and slow the business a lot to get things under control,” Caintic said.
Here’s a look at the other changes that Ally announced on Wednesday:
* Meghan Ryan will succeed Richard as chief audit executive. Ryan has held several jobs at Ally, most recently chief financial officer for Ally’s consumer and commercial banking businesses. She will report to Rhodes as well as to the board of directors’ audit committee, according to the company spokesperson.
* Lindsay Sacknoff will join Ally on Jan. 13, overseeing retail deposits and investment-related businesses. Sacknoff comes to Ally from USAA, which she joined in late 2020 as the head of payments, deposits and bank omnichannel sales and services, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Prior to joining USAA, Sacknoff was the head of U.S. consumer deposits, products and payments at TD Bank. Her 10-year tenure at TD overlapped with Rhodes’ 12-year career there. She will report to Rhodes and be based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
* Anand Talwar, who previously held the position that Sacknoff is assuming, will move into a new role leading Ally’s enterprise transformation work and report to Chief Financial Officer Russ Hutchinson.
* Sean Leary, Ally’s head of investor relations and corporate financial planning and analysis, will take on some additional responsibilities. Leary will now be responsible for all business line CFOs and will continue to report to Hutchinson.
* Kathie Patterson, Ally’s chief human resources officer, will now run the Ally Charitable Foundation, following the departure of Alison Summerville, the bank’s business administration executive.