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When Francis Mitchell joined banking-as-a-service provider Hatch Bank as CFO earlier this year, he stepped into the role at a time when the sponsor bank was refining how its finance function supports long-term growth and risk management.
Mitchell, who has a background in balance sheet strategy, treasury and capital markets, says his first months in the role have focused on evaluating the maturity of the finance and accounting organization. That includes reviewing processes across areas such as liquidity, reporting and internal controls to identify where systems and workflows can scale with the business.
In a conversation with CFO.com, Mitchell discussed his early priorities at Hatch, how his experience managing liquidity informs his approach to risk planning and how he is evaluating emerging finance tools, including artificial intelligence platforms such as Claude AI, for tasks like reporting and workflow automation.
CFO, Hatch Bank
First CFO Position: 2024
Notable previous employers:
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Rock Creek Partners
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BankFund Credit Union
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Republic Bank
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Truist
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
FRANCIS MITCHELL: Several factors drew me to Hatch. First, what motivates me is building things. My background is in engineering, so I’ve always been drawn to situations where I can help build and scale organizations. This felt like a pivotal time for Hatch. A lot of groundwork had already been laid, but the company was looking for someone to come in and help build on that foundation and make it more scalable.
The team was another big factor, both the leadership at Hatch and the parent company [Firstrust Bank]. When you talk to CFOs and other executives, people tend to want three things in their careers: autonomy, the right culture and the opportunity to work with driven, intelligent people. During the interview process, I saw evidence of those things, and I tend to trust actions more than words.
Now that I’m settled in, one of the first things I like to do is what I call a maturity assessment. The goal is to evaluate the entire finance and accounting function and identify areas for improvement. For example, we might look at liquidity and break it down into components such as liquidity access, internal and external reporting, policies, procedures and contingency planning. Each area gets scored on a scale from one to 10, with 10 representing best in class.
From there, we assess the regulatory, operational and strategic impact. That helps create a roadmap for where we need to invest resources or strengthen processes. We’re finishing that assessment now, and it will help guide where we focus going forward.
Many CFOs come up through one of two paths: the treasurer route or the accounting route. My background is on the treasury and finance side, focused on financial modeling, capital markets, balance sheet management and profitability.
Over time, I’ve learned more of the accounting side, understanding the close process and the mechanics behind it. But I’ve never been someone who wakes up excited about journal entries. I’m much more focused on the broader picture, how the balance sheet performs and how the business generates profitability.
One of the best CFOs I worked for had a similar background. During difficult times, you really see leadership show up, and that experience reinforced for me the value of having a strong finance and capital markets perspective in the CFO role.
In terms of the team, we already have a solid foundation. I don’t see major gaps that immediately need to be filled. One area where we can strengthen capabilities, though, is around artificial intelligence.
The pace of change in AI is extremely fast. Within finance teams, there’s still a lot of manual work happening, even though the world still runs on Excel. Excel isn’t going anywhere, but there are many repetitive tasks that could be streamlined with AI tools.
For example, we’re working on improving our procedures documentation. Instead of someone manually writing everything out, we can use tools like Copilot to speak through a process and generate the procedural documentation automatically.
A big focus for me is helping the team become more comfortable with AI and identifying ways it can make their work more efficient.
A few weekends ago, I was watching YouTube videos about Claude and some of the things it can do. I don’t know what that says about my personal life, but I was spending a Saturday night looking at ways we might use it.
One thing I’m interested in testing relates to how we build presentations and reporting. I’m definitely what people would call a “deck guy.” On our executive team, I’m always saying we need to create a deck.
When I think about something like the asset liability committee, it’s usually presented through a slide deck with many of the same tables and metrics each time. You’ll see investment tables, interest rate risk metrics such as net interest income or economic value of equity and other recurring data.
A lot of that work is repetitive. So I’ve been exploring whether AI can help update those decks automatically while keeping our formatting and templates consistent.
With Claude, for example, you can potentially upload existing decks and templates and create an agent that updates them based on new data. I haven’t fully tested it yet, but I just subscribed to Claude Pro and plan to experiment with it. I started with OpenAI’s tools, which have been helpful, but I’m experimenting with both.
You can already see how quickly these tools are evolving. For example, you can upload invoices or receipts and have the system extract the information into spreadsheets or trigger follow-up tasks.
So I see both sides. There’s huge productivity potential, but also disruption if organizations and employees don’t adapt to how quickly things are changing.
Liquidity management is an area where my background has been especially valuable. Much of that experience came from my time at Republic Bank, a roughly $6 billion commercial bank in Philadelphia.
When I joined the management team there, we knew we were entering a difficult situation. The bank had a CAMELS 4 composite rating, which means funding sources begin tightening quickly, and you’re essentially working through a wind-down process.
Despite that environment, my team was able to keep the bank operating for about 10 months. That experience gave us an incredible amount of insight into managing liquidity under stress.
During that time, we also created the first tri-party repo arrangement between the Federal Reserve and the Federal Home Loan Bank. That structure has since been adopted more broadly by other FHLBs.
One of the challenges Silicon Valley Bank faced was the inability to move securities quickly enough between the FHLB and the Fed because the process was very manual and the markets closed earlier in the day.
Experiences like that give you a deep appreciation for liquidity planning.
In the sponsor banking model, the challenge can look a little different. You often have a higher concentration risk because you have a smaller number of partners or programs rather than a large retail deposit base.
That means you have to think carefully about funding sources and their stability. Traditional banks may have large portfolios of loans that can be pledged to the FHLB or the Fed for funding, but sponsor banks often don’t have the same mix of assets.
At Hatch, there was already a strong culture around managing liquidity risk. My role is really to reinforce that mindset and ensure we plan conservatively.
We’re working through a five-year strategic plan that is heavily driven by liquidity considerations. Instead of focusing only on asset growth, we’re asking whether we have sufficient liquidity in different scenarios and how we would respond if market conditions changed.
One advantage of working at a privately held bank is that we’re not under the same pressure to meet quarterly earnings targets. That allows us to take a longer-term view and prioritize stability and resilience.
One thing that’s a little different in our operating model, and may be true across sponsor banks more broadly, is that roles tend to overlap more than they might at a traditional bank.
At a traditional institution, you might have very defined roles like head of retail banking or head of commercial lending. At a sponsor bank, the leadership team often wears multiple hats, and there’s more overlap between areas like operations, credit and treasury.
The maturity assessment I mentioned earlier helps with that collaboration. It shows the executive team where finance needs to work more closely with other groups to be successful.
For example, we’re involved when evaluating new third-party relationships because we need to understand the potential liquidity impact. We also collaborate closely with credit since finance owns areas like Current Expected Credit Losses and the allowance for credit losses.
Operations is another area where there’s a lot of interaction, particularly around liquidity and reporting. We also work with teams across the organization to develop KPIs and performance metrics.
More broadly, the culture at Hatch isn’t one where people say, “This is my lane.” There’s a lot of openness to input across teams, which makes collaboration much easier.
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