Mission: Increase Aprio’s presence in Canadian and, potentially, international boardrooms
Assets: 20 years’ experience in the financial service sector, including a decade in top roles with Vancity
Yield: The successful integration of Citizens Bank with its Vancity corporate parent
By Curt Cherewayko
About seven years ago, while Ian Warner was CEO of Citizens Bank of Canada, he spent a day working at the bank’s call centre to familiarize himself with that arm of its operations.
When he received a call seeking information about a mortgage product, rather than patching the customer through to the mortgage branch, Warner stood and shouted at a worker across the room for information.
It was a habit he had developed from his many years in the high-stakes bull-pit atmosphere of foreign exchange floors.
After nearly a decade in major executive roles at Citizens Bank and as operational head of Vancity, Warner became president and CEO of Aprio Inc. in October.
Warner took the job at the small seven-year-old Vancouver-based software developer partly out of a desire to return to a work environment with the same kind of immediacy and urgency he experienced early in his career as a currency trader on foreign exchange floors in Vancouver and Tokyo.
“The thing with foreign exchange trading is that you always see it; it’s always front and centre,” he told Business in Vancouver recently. “You’re constantly making money or losing money.”
He noted that as he climbed the ranks of the banking sector, his job increasingly became less about the minute-to-minute tangibles and more about communicating broader visions or long-term strategies.
At Aprio, which has fewer than 10 employees, Warner gets to focus as much on the next sale as he does the company’s long-term vision.
“It’s not about what our sales report looks like, it’s about landing that next [sale],” said Warner. “It’s a minute-by-minute approach of getting that next account.”
After graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1980 with a commerce degree, Warner began his career as a foreign exchange trader with the Bank of Nova Scotia.
Later, he went to Tokyo to work for Royal Bank of Canada’s currency trading division.
In 1988, he returned to Vancouver to become senior vice-president of treasury management and credit for Citizens Bank, a Vancity subsidiary that led the credit union’s initiative to expand its online presence and national footprint.
As a high-stakes currency trader, Warner was not familiar with Citizens Bank’s strong corporate social responsibility bent, but he fit in well with the organization.
“We hired Ian because he has a great background,” said Dave Mowat, Vancity’s former president and CEO who now heads up ATB Financial in Alberta. “He’s worked inside Canada and outside Canada in a range of financial roles.”
With a solid understanding of Citizens Banks’ role as an asset of Vancity rather than a stand-alone organization, he was promoted to CEO of the bank in 2001.
“Citizens was largely going off in its own direction,” said Warner. “It wasn’t necessarily working. My approach was, from a strategic perspective, to say, ‘This is valuable to Vancity for the following reasons.’”
Under his watch, Citizens Bank re-aligned its suite of financial products with the bank’s new ethical policy, which included an examination of the bank’s clientele.
Corporate social responsibility is becoming the norm in banking – in image if not in practice – but at the time, Citizens Bank’s ethical policy and its CSR-driven product restructuring were novel.
In 2006, Warner was promoted to Vancity COO.
While Mowat was the credit union’s visionary and largely responsible for developing its CSR and carbon neutral strategy – the latter was also novel in the financial services sector – Warner put Mowat’s vision into action.
According to Mowat, Warner’s greatest accomplishments during his 10 years with Vancity and Citizens Bank was to make Citizens Bank compliant with the industry’s new regulatory requirements and to lay the groundwork for consolidating Vancity and Citizens Bank departments.
Mowat said the consolidation delivers considerable savings.
“And you can’t leave out the fact that [Ian] developed a very loyal team that probably would have walked over hot coals for him,” said Mowat.
Since leaving Vancity in 2007, Warner has been doing some corporate consulting and been involved in a handful of real estate projects, while looking for a more stable opportunity.
“This organization is exactly what I was looking for when I left Vancity,” said Warner, noting that he even tried unsuccessfully to acquire a smaller software developer.
Aprio sells subscription-based software that corporate secretaries use to manage board governance.
Aprio Boardroom reduces paperwork and allows documents and other information to be distributed to board members in remote locations. It also lets corporate secretaries set up permission gateways to restrict member access to certain information or documents.
“Once you get a strong structure of board governance in place, you bring out much richer conversations,” said Warner. “And you get to use your board of directors for what a board is for: good guidance and good governance of your organization.”
He added that some boards have been reluctant to adopt new technologies that can make them more efficient.
Warner suspects that an older demographic that might not be receptive to technological change dominates many boards. But as that demographic retires, it will be replaced with a younger one that’s increasingly accustomed to using new technologies. Warner consequently sees growth potential for Aprio, which has a small but established stable of clients, including credit unions, junior mining companies and Crown corporations across Canada.
Aprio’s founder John Kidder remains the company’s visionary, but he’s more adept at commercializing ideas than developing commercial organizations.
That’s where Warner comes in.
“[We’re going] to start measuring all the things we’re doing right and demonstrating that we’re doing more of those things more efficiently than we were yesterday,” said Warner.
“It’s not that people aren’t working hard here … it’s just that it has to be pulled together, so that we can say, ‘We need to be on this trajectory.’”