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Eugene A. Ludwig, Chairman
Mr. Ludwig is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Promontory Financial Group, LLC, the leading consulting firm for financial companies worldwide. Mr. Ludwig is also Chairman and CEO of Promontory Interfinancial Network, LLC, among other related companies.
Prior to founding Promontory, Mr. Ludwig was Vice Chairman and Senior Control Officer of Bankers Trust/Deutsche Bank. He joined Bankers Trust in 1998, and was a member of the firm’s Management Committee, Chairman of the Control Committee and Co-Chairman of the Capital Commitment Committee.
Earlier, Mr. Ludwig served for five years as Comptroller of the Currency of the United States. As Comptroller, Mr. Ludwig headed the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the federal agency responsible for supervising the preponderance of bank assets in the United States.
During his tenure as Comptroller, Mr. Ludwig also was Chairman of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council revitalizing the work of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.
He served as Chairman of the interagency Federal Consumer Electronic Payments Task Force, a Director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a member of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, and Chairman of the Neighborhood Housing Services.
Gene led the OCC during a period of substantial change – both within the financial marketplace as well as in the supervisory and examination practices of the agency. He is credited with improving the safety and soundness supervision of the banking industry and developing a “supervision by risk” approach to bank supervision that has been adopted by leading regulators worldwide.
At the same time, Gene spearheaded efforts to reform the Community Reinvestment Act and vigorously enforce the fair lending laws that resulted in a fourfold increase in financing for America’s low- and moderate-income communities.
Prior to being Comptroller, Gene was a partner in the law firm of Covington & Burling in Washington, specializing in banking law.
He has written numerous articles on banking and finance for scholarly journals and publications and has been a guest lecturer at Yale and Harvard law schools and Georgetown University’s International Law Institute.
A native of York, Pennsylvania, he graduated magna cum laude from Haverford College and received a scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Masters of Arts degree as a Keasbey Fellow. He holds a LLB from Yale University where he was editor of the Yale Law Journal and chairman of Yale Legislative Services.
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Neil Smith, Chief Executive Officer
Neil has more than 15 years experience leading large-scale performance improvements and, before that, spent 6 years serving as the CEO of a manufacturing company.
His manufacturing experience helped Neil to develop the PGI approach to dramatic profit improvement for Fortune 750 companies. The PGI Promise process had its origins in the financial services industry in the early 1990’s. Neil was able to demonstrate that techniques learned in banking could be applied even more effectively to other industries, when he led a ground-breaking project in the transportation industry in 1998. Other successes followed. In 2000, Neil first showed that the techniques could be applied to large companies when he led a hugely successful project at a 23,000 person company. In 2001, the same techniques were used for the first time with a company which was not only large and global, but could be considered a true industry leader. Working with the CEO and his team, and his Promontory colleague Gene Ludwig, Neil demonstrated that there are huge opportunities in even the best of companies.
Over the last few years, a number of the companies Neil has worked with are rated among the best in their industries including healthcare, banking, food manufacturing, distribution and insurance. He has a flair for making the best companies even better.
Before buying the food manufacturing company in a leveraged buyout, Neil spent five years with McKinsey & Company, working in New York and London, and helped to build McKinsey's early work in Brazil and Indonesia. As a senior member of the change practice, he pioneered client growth initiatives and led innovative restructurings. His clients include television, healthcare, hotels, steel manufacturing, banking and insurance companies.
Before business school Neil was a journalist in London, working with the BBC and the London Sunday Times.
Neil is British and serves on the International Advisory Board of British American Business, Inc. (the British American Chamber of Commerce). He is a member of a Harvard Business School alumni committee and is Chairman of the U.S. Alumni of the University of Keele.
Neil has an M.B.A. with honors from the Harvard Business School, where he was a Knox Fellow. He also has a B.A. with honors in Physics and Economics from the University of Keele in England.
Neil enjoys rugby, soccer, cricket, and baseball, and collects ancient British coins.
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Fred Weling, Senior Managing Director
Fred has more than 15 years of experience as a management consultant and 10 years of experience in different R&D and strategic planning functions in a large multinational company.
He has spent most of the last 9 years managing company-wide performance improvement projects. He worked with Neil to bring about significant and lasting performance improvements in large companies. His most recent clients have been in banking, food manufacturing and real estate.
Fred worked for 2 years with PricewaterhouseCoopers in San Francisco, where he developed growth and market entry strategies for high-tech companies developing disruptive technologies.
He spent 4 years with Arthur D. Little mostly working in Berlin, where he was one of the leading members of the Corporate Restructuring practice. His work encompassed strategy development for challenged high tech companies and turnaround projects for manufacturers of telecommunications equipment. This is where he developed the interest and the skills to make large scale improvements in companies.
Before becoming a management consultant, Fred spent 10 years with Philips Electronics. He started as a Research Scientist in Germany and The Netherlands, where he acquired several patents in optical fiber technology. His interests soon expanded into R&D management and technology strategy. He then became a strategic planner in Philips’ Telecommunications Division.
Fred holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Cologne. He received a M.Sc. degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Louvain. He has published numerous articles in international scientific journals, and he taught at several universities in Canada, the US and Switzerland.
Fred is also fluent in German, French and Dutch, which has enabled him to run international projects in the local language.
He enjoys swimming, hiking, traveling and photography.
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