Todd Baker

  • Lecturer in Law

Todd H. 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. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy at Columbia Business School and Columbia Law School, where 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, The Wall Street Journal and the 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 NA, TD Bank, N.A., and Washington Mutual, Inc. In those executive roles he managed, at various times, strategic and financial planning, acquisitions & 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 LLP and Morrison & Foerster LLP, 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 & 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.