Pk Parekh Email & Phone Number

Elgin, Il, Us

Following many years of dedication to NCCP’s mission, I was invited to join its Board and contribute my expertise in strategic planning to shape the roadmap for NCCP’s future. I am currently developing NCCP’s new multi-year plan with the goal to sustain even greater positive impact in North Chicago and surrounding communities.

As an independent contractor, I augment the operating staff at private equity firms. Often, these firms need an expert resource with deep industry expertise, functional knowledge, or external perspective to conduct due diligence on investment opportunities, create or revitalize ambitious plans for profit growth, expose operational blind spots, advise portfolio CEOs on how to overcome challenges, or fill in temporarily when there is a leadership vacancy. That's what I do. I improve the value certainty and help private equity portfolio companies achieve extraordinary results within desired timeframes.

Returning to this amazing role, I continued leading the #1 provider of home equity loans in the US. We accomplished double-digit growth in annual new loan volume, outpaced competitors in 2022 and 2023, and doubled the size of our loan portfolio, becoming the #1 bank in home equity loan portfolio size. We further reduced our unit costs to 70% lower than the mortgage industry average through simplification, standardization, automation, digital transformation, and other pillars of the operating model I instilled in the organization. I was appointed Chairperson of the Consumer Bankers Association’s Home Equity Committee, moderated monthly discussions with counterparts at 40+ banks, and authored industry position papers regarding proposed regulations.

At our CEO’s request, I rotated back to Discover Student Loans (which held #2 market share in private education loans for students at US colleges and graduate schools) and led the company’s actions to comply with a consent order issued by the CFPB in 2020. While our primary focus was on compliance, we also grew the student loan portfolio to $10 billion and achieved record profitability in 2021.I chaired the cross-functional Regulatory Matters Working Group and presented often to the company’s Regulatory Matters Oversight Committee and Board of Directors. I completed my 2-year term as Vice Chairperson of the Consumer Bankers Association’s Home Equity Committee and also served on the Education Funding Committee where we worked as an industry on numerous federal and state-level policy issues.The consent order was very demoralizing for the organization which prided itself on responsible lending principles and industry-leading customer service. We were also in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic with the entire organization working remotely. I immediately took and sustained actions to improve morale such as establishing and advocating norms for work-life balance, taking time to explain the reasoning behind our decisions to all employees, and answering every question from anyone at any level in the organization. By mid-2021, we improved employee satisfaction survey results to be on par with the external high-performing benchmark.In my role leading our actions to comply with the consent order, I fostered close collaboration between departments that reported directly to me and matrix corporate functions such as Discover’s legal organization, compliance advisory, business risk, and others. We significantly reduced the volume of issues introduced by change, significantly increased the identification of existing but previously undetected issues (most of which had been occurring for years), and increased the self-identification rate of these issues to 90%.

I was promoted to Senior Vice President with Discover and continued in my role as the president of our mortgage business. We automated processes and built an industry-leading digital mortgage experience at a fraction of the investment made by prominent mortgage competitors. We achieved the #1 spot for market share of home equity loan originations in 2020. We also achieved 90% digital mortgage application starts, 98% digital engagement, 95% overall customer satisfaction, and manufacturing unit cost 50% less than the mortgage industry average. We were recognized with Celent Model Bank Awards in 2020 and 2021 for innovating like a fintech and for industry-leading pandemic response.I wrote position papers to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on how to improve proposed regulatory rule making (such as revisions to the Qualified Mortgage definition) and collaborated with third-party providers to bring innovations to market (such as regulatory compliance automation). I led a cross-functional team through preparation for and completion of a major federal regulatory exam, and we completed it with a satisfactory outcome. We created new and better ways to document processes, assess controls, and implement change — and these inspired and were integrated into a company-wide operational excellence program across other lines of business.I served on the steering group for the company-wide operational excellence program, coaching multiple work stream owners. I also represented multiple business units in the new company-wide Data & Analytics leadership forum.To reflect that we offered more than home equity loans, we simplified the name of the mortgage business from Discover Home Equity Loans to Discover Home Loans.

In 2014, while running marketing and driving the turnaround for the non-bank mortgage company, I was simultaneously appointed as overall head of another mortgage business within Discover Bank that focused on home equity loans and was launched by a colleague the year earlier. I led a more complex, multi-year financial and operational turnaround of the new mortgage business inside the bank, including changing personnel, product design, and systems as well as radically simplifying the mortgage process. We terminated the relationship with our original outsourced processing partner, re-evaluated all of our other third-party service providers, implemented a new mortgage originations system, and in-sourced most of application processing and closing.

In 2013, I transferred to a non-bank mortgage subsidiary that Discover acquired a year earlier. That business was losing money in the higher interest rate environment and needed a plan to get back on track. As chief marketing officer, I led marketing channels, offers and promotions, business development, sales strategy, state licensing, and dialer operations. I also developed and engaged my peers to implement a broader financial, operational, and pricing turnaround strategy that restored profitability in 2014 and achieved growth in market share for home purchases and mortgage refinance.

Post-integration of the two companies, as chief product, marketing & analytics officer for student loans, I expanded the product range and delivered 60% annual organic originations growth in 2012 and again in 2013, making Discover Bank the #3 private student loan company in US market share, while lowering the unit cost for new loans.

After the acquisition closed at the end of 2010, I led the post-acquisition integration including standardization of policies, reorganization, and technology and operations roadmaps for combination of Discover Bank's organic student loan business and the larger acquired business (which had >5x employee base and >10x executive roles). As part of the reorganization, I decided to give up some of my responsibilities so the larger business could run better with clear lines of responsibility across the new and larger management team.

In 2007, with a small team of just three people and two excellent partner companies, I launched this new line of business for Discover Bank. We missed the growth goal in the first year, but then we adapted, made improvements, and went on to originate over $2 billion in federal student loans and grow the business organically to be the #5 private student loan company in market share of originations by 2010. Our team grew and our competitors took notice and started copying our business model, including our innovative Graduation Reward and our replication of processes for federal student loans to prevent over-borrowing through private student loans. During these years, I led all business functions including strategy, product management, pricing, marketing, underwriting, operations, technology, and vendor management.I also conducted diligence on a number of competitors to determine if an acquisition would complement our organic growth and capabilities. In 2010, we zeroed in on an opportunity to acquire one particular competitor that was larger than us. That acquisition was initially run by corporate development, but at some point someone needed to step up and coordinate all of the groups and activities needed to get the deal done. So I filled the void and started coordinating activities with the legal department and outside counsel, finance and credit risk, operations, and other areas. It was the largest acquisition in Discover's history and a complex multi-party transaction with multiple agreements.

I was promoted to senior manager and assumed responsibility for the enterprise collections project management office, design and administration of incentive compensation, implementation of a new reporting platform and the collections website.

I was promoted and began managing people while continuing to operate as chief of staff and a special projects resource.

I joined Discover as an internal consultant, chief of staff, and special projects resource to the executive responsible for credit card authorizations, collections, and recovery. In addition to that work, I was one of four people who created the company's MBA recruiting program. I wrote and delivered training based on my prior consulting experience to develop employees' communication skills, quantitative decision making, and knowledge of operations. I supported several other executives by writing the storylines and storyboards for their presentations to senior executives and the board of directors.

I worked as a freelance management consultant and subcontractor for consulting firms with financial services clients, while teaching math and studying math in my free time.

Our firm was acquired and the new company changed its name. I continued to work as a management consultant, including on more technical projects to define use cases, features, and logical designs. I didn't know how to code but I understood math and logic, so I created a language of symbolic pseudo-code to communicate complex syntactical rules with software developers.Coinciding with the dot com bust, the new company began to have cash flow issues. Based on expertise in collections strategy I demonstrated through multiple prior client engagements as a consultant, I was recruited for an internal consulting team to help stabilize our firm's financial condition. In this role, I began managing other analysts and associates and eventually transferred from a client-facing management consulting practice to our firm's corporate finance and accounting department.Our efforts were not successful enough and our firm filed bankruptcy, initially to reorganize and then later to liquidate. I was retained through multiple rounds of layoffs and sale transactions, and I supported the bankruptcy trustee in analyzing asset dispositions as one of the last ten employees in a firm that peaked around 10,000 people.

I joined this general management consultancy as an analyst on financial and operational turnarounds and other strategy engagements for clients in multiple industries, including financial services and private equity portfolio companies. Through those projects, I practiced logical structuring, hypothesis-based problem solving, interviewing, financial modeling, and writing executive presentations.I was one of the few analysts sponsored to attend a mini-MBA program at Yale designed for new hires with PhDs joining as associates, and I was subsequently promoted to associate.I received feedback that I didn't have the outgoing personality needed for recruiting, so I responded by signing up to run undergraduate recruiting in our office, showed I could do it effectively, and flipped perceptions about my capabilities.

Years ago, while being rejected for this internship because the position was already filled, I asked to be kept in mind if the situation changed. A week later, I got a call back with an invitation to interview and that started a sequence of networking that led to an early career in management consulting, joining Discover, and great opportunities to create industry-leading businesses.

Ms, Financial Mathematics

I was admitted to this awesome graduate program after being told by the director not to bother applying, pausing and reflecting.

Ba, Two Concentrations: 1 = Biological Sciences, And 2 = South Asian Studies

Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Summer Research Fellowship Thesis paper on Hindi film analysis

High School Diploma