Gerald J. Ford

Gerald J. Ford is currently the Chairman at Hilltop Holdings. Prior to this, they were with Elevate for two years, from January 2018 to December 2019, where they were the Director of Application Development.

Elevate is a company that provides responsible credit solutions to non-prime consumers. They have originated $4.5 billion in credit to more than 1.7 million customers to date. Their goal is to provide immediate relief to customers and help them build a brighter financial future. To do this, they reward borrowers for good financial behavior with features like interest rates that can go down over time, free financial training and free credit monitoring.

Ford was responsible for leading the Application Development team for the Elevate RISE product, the company's flagship product. Gerald's focus areas were growing a strong Agile culture and upleveling software engineering practices to ensure delivery of software products that would delight Elevate's customer community.

During their time with the company, they engaged consultants to perform a team reboot, which included assessments of Agile skills and capabilities, software engineering practices, and level set understanding of Agile roles and responsibilities with product team. Gerald also led the design and implementation of a bank partnership program that created a 15% revenue increase. In addition, they revamped the offshore development team from staff augmentation to a Kanban team to update the technology stack and improve performance and customer experience. Lastly, they drove process improvements in software release practices; reducing release time from 5 hours to 1 hour, with zero rollbacks due to defective code. Gerald championed the shift to automated testing and implementation of CI/CD practices.

Gerald J. Ford has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in operations and economics from the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. They also have certification from the Scrum Alliance in Certified Scrum Product Owner and Certified Scrum Master.