Todd Mayhew, CHRO at Snap Finance

Show Notes

From Reorg to Results: Snap Finance’s CHRO on Org Design, AI Adoption, and the People Strategy Edge

Summary

If your org chart changes but execution doesn’t, you’re missing the “connective tissue.” Todd Mayhew, Chief Human Resources Officer at Snap Finance, shares how he’s guiding a fintech at an inflection point—from a transaction-based model to a consumer platform—by aligning structure, process, and behavior.

Five months into the role, Todd is reorganizing around centers of excellence, using RACIs to create clarity, and applying the Galbraith Star Model to ensure strategy, structure, process, rewards, and people move in lockstep.

A USC doctorate in Organizational Change & Leadership gives him the language and evidence to influence CFOs and engineers with data, not just theory. Todd also reframes AI as an HR discipline: you onboard, coach, and measure it like a teammate, model adoption as a leader, and spotlight internal wins to drive behavior change.

He cautions that AI augments capability—it won’t replace missing analytical muscles—and makes the case that a business strategy without a people strategy is a pipe dream. Expect practical guidance for turning reorganizations into results, building analytic acumen in HR, and making AI real across a global workforce.

Timestamps

[00:45] – Guest intro and Snap Finance’s mission: serving consumers under financial stress

[02:53] – Global footprint and the big shift: from transactions to a relationship platform

[04:24] – Centers of excellence, org design, and why RACIs reduce friction and decision fatigue

[05:17] – The “connective tissue” leaders miss in reorgs: roles, processes, and accountability

[06:53] – Change that sticks: culture as behavior + the Galbraith Star Model explained

[08:21] – Todd’s path: public administration to HR, plus a USC doctorate in org change

[10:39] – Influencing with evidence: meeting CFOs/engineers with data; people strategy as essential

[13:56] – Making AI real: exercise analogy, “hiring” GPT as L&D, modeling adoption, and sharing wins

[19:13] – Guardrails: AI augments but doesn’t replace baseline skills; why HR must build analytics

Takeaways

- Design with the Galbraith Star: align strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people to avoid reorg stall-outs.

- Build the “connective tissue”: use RACIs and clear process ownership so decisions stick and work flows.

- Lead AI by example: onboard and coach AI like a teammate, then showcase internal wins to drive adoption.

- Bring data to the table: use evidence and research to influence financially minded leaders and shape strategy.

- Invest in analytics in HR: AI amplifies capability but won’t fix gaps in financial or analytical acumen.

- Shift from transactions to relationships: organize into centers of excellence to scale a platform model.

Sponsor

AllVoices brings all your employee relations work together in one place. No more jumping between spreadsheets, emails, and legacy systems just one place to document and manage reports, cases, investigations, and performance conversations. It helps you run a more consistent process, takes busywork off your plate with AI, and makes it easier to spot trends early, so you can work proactively, not just put out fires.

See a demo at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.allvoices.co/

What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Rebecca Taylor (00:01)
Hello and welcome to this episode of HR Voices. I'm here with Todd Mayhew. He's the CHRO of Snap Finance. And Todd, thank you so much for coming today. I'm excited to have you on the show.

Todd Mayhew (00:11)
Well, thank you for having me. You've had an array of talented guests. I'm happy to be counted among them.

Rebecca Taylor (00:16)
I'm excited because I actually just took over hosting the podcast from Emily, who's really kind of set us up for success. So I told her, I was like, you had a lot of like really great early guests and you've really set a lot of the stage. So now I just get to jump in when it's a little bit more figured out and we can just make sure that we keep rolling with the momentum. So I think we're in a good spot to kind of keep some good stuff going here.

Todd Mayhew (00:37)
Excellent, looking forward to it.

Rebecca Taylor (00:38)
Yeah. So I love to kind of open up with learning a little bit more about you, your organization, the people that you support. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Todd Mayhew (00:46)
Sure. you mentioned the CHROT Snap Finance been in the role for grand total of five months. ⁓ We started about a decade ago as a FinTech. ⁓ Our founder discovered that there was a big market need for ⁓ financing solutions for really consumers under distress. So he figured out that there are people who just don't have access to financing but really need financing for urgent things like tires, right? If you are depending on your vehicle.

for your employment and your livelihood and you need tires and you can't that moment afford it, you know, there are very limited solutions for you. So he created this fintech to fill that space and did so very successfully using machine learning and other kind of risk modeling and insights to fill this market very successfully. So anyway, I got approached about five months ago to join because the company is at a really neat inflection point. ⁓ You know, while we had kind of

first mover advantage, the marketplace is getting sort of crowded with other new entrants and competitors. And now we're looking at how do we harvest this great business model that we've created and create even more opportunities to help consumers who might be under some financial duress. So I'd give them more options, more things that we can provide to them to give them financial success and security. it's been a lot of fun in five months. I've learned a ton and I'm so glad I joined this organization.

Rebecca Taylor (02:12)
That's so cool. you know, I mean, it's a weird time to join because I don't know anybody who's in any financial distress right now. So I don't really know what you all are doing or how you're getting business.

Todd Mayhew (02:21)
Right. Right. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Right. It's unfortunate reality that there are a lot of consumers out there who really need what we offer. Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (02:29)
Yeah, yeah, the work is really, really needed. And I think that's why I was so excited to chat with you too, because in sort of the role that you have within Snap, you're supporting all of the people that allow those products to be built and allow people to access it. So can you talk to us a little bit about your employees, sort of where, what kinds of, I guess, what kinds of challenges are they facing in sort of an environment that I imagine is really busy? Like what sort of the work landscape look like for them now?

Todd Mayhew (02:53)
Yeah, so we, mean, obviously we have, you know, we're, we're fintech. So I have a big technology organization. Um, we, uh, we have a big sales organization, right? Um, that, you know, it spreads out across the U S we have a big, uh, talented pool of employees in Costa Rica. Uh, we have a business in the UK. We have some, a few employees in Germany. Uh, but fundamentally, um, you know, the, the, the, so the, groups that we support are all on this journey together. And that is how do we take this great platform we've built?

and turn it into a true platform, you know, kind of a surround sound of consumer financial products that can help distract, distress customers. So that's the big challenge for all of us from technology to our sales forces, to our different market segments. ⁓ How do we move from being kind of a transaction based company, right? So where someone goes into a merchant, they're under distress, they need some help, you know, to, you know, having a more continuous relationship with that consumer to help them.

in multiple phases of their journey. So that's the broad strategic challenge that we're all kind of trying to figure out. Of course, we have resource constraints and priority changes and stuff. And so I jumped right in and was tasked by my CEO to sort of help restructure the organization to make us sort of more centers of excellence focused so that we can leverage our resources more efficiently to try to help with this transformation. for me and my team, it's been really about org design, org effectiveness.

roles and responsibilities, of racies and so forth. That's been a very exciting part of my first five months.

Rebecca Taylor (04:24)
That's cool. I love a good racy. To me, it's the map of how anything can happen. I'm a nerd for racy charts. Yeah.

Todd Mayhew (04:29)
Yeah, yes. Yeah, I know. mean, it's old school, but it works, right? It's been around for a long

time and you know, it's dispassionate. Like, let's just sort of agree on who does what, who owns what, right? And it's a good jump off point for like building process and building the connective tissue for a new org design. So yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (04:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And it brings clarity because I think there's, you know, not every, not every single thing that you're trying to do within the company has to take so much of your brain. Sometimes if you can have some things just sort of simple, like a, you know, a chart that kind of shows you who makes what decision it allows you to then kind of use your brain for the bigger level, higher level things, which I mean, we have to mention it, right. With the rise of AI, theoretically, you know, the higher level work that we're doing is the stuff that's more interpersonal so that, you know, that's kind of where a lot of the nuances of,

Todd Mayhew (05:02)
Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (05:13)
HR and the nuances of how we're working is really kind of going in that direction too.

Todd Mayhew (05:17)
I agree. know, Rebecca, the one thing I would just say is agree with your statement. AI will certainly allow us to kind of unlock kind of new levels of capability. In my experience, though, and embarrassed to say it's almost 25 years, right? But what organizations often overlook in any kind of strategic reorg. So, you know, they're good at just defining, hey, here's the new market we want to go after. Here's the new strategy. Here's what we're not going to do. All right, let's organize around that. And usually the

pretty good at moving boxes and org charts, but they often overlook the connective tissue, right? It's always, know, it's, no, we don't know who's responsible, so no one's accountable. you know, so it's being really conscious of, all right, we, you know, yes, we can move the boxes in the org chart and, you know, have changed reporting relationships, but let's really make sure we consider how work's actually gonna get done and who is gonna do what, when, and in my experience, is that organizations generally are very bad.

And I'm saying, I'm fortunate that we are devoting, spending the necessary calories, I think to get that right with our new org model. So, yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (06:23)
I

think that's such a really good call out. It's like, I forget exactly what the statistic is, to be honest, but I know that there were statistics about how many company initiatives actually fail because of poor change management. And it's when it's the reinforcement part that just sort of drops. It's everyone makes a plan, they make their announcements, they say this is it. And then they don't do the constant, you know, the reps, the constant follow up. They're not sort of constantly bringing people back down to the why the change happened and kind of using that as the center to drive the behavior change that you're looking for.

Todd Mayhew (06:53)
Yeah, totally agree. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, again, people, know, cultures reinforce the people part and culture is just behavior reinforced by leaders and systems over time. Right. And so you're right. If you don't pay attention to those components, you're likely likely to fail. I always go back to when I do or redesign. It's been, you know, a model that's been around for decades, but it's a Galbraith star. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, but but it. Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (06:53)
⁓ and that's the hard part is the people part.

Mmm, I'm not I've no of it, but I'm not that familiar with it to

be honest,

Todd Mayhew (07:21)
Yeah, I it

starts with defining your strategy, right? And then, know, kind of what's your structure? ⁓ What processes do you need? What are rewards? Are you going to institute to kind of reinforce the behaviors and then the people, right? And do you have the right, you know, kind of people? And so that's a really elegant and simple model. That's, you know, what stood the test of time ⁓ to to help guide organizations and something that I've used, you know, throughout my career and I'm using it still now, right? To make sure you if you forget any of those pieces, you're likely going to run into trouble, right? And

to your point that people component is one critical component of the star.

Rebecca Taylor (07:54)
Yeah, that's really interesting.

so I think there's, mean, something that I want to kind of ask you about is sort of how your path to HR, because it sounds like you're good at sort of the people, you know, the people side of thing, obviously, and, you know, the connective tissue and the learning, and you have a doctorate in education. So how does that help you in your HR role? How did that, how did you get to HR from that path? Or was it, are they even sort of connected? Or how did that happen, I guess?

Todd Mayhew (08:21)
Yeah, no, a good question. ⁓ This is a long story, probably longer than ⁓ we have time to, but I'll give you the CliffsNotes version. ⁓ So I did an undergrad, I'm Canadian by background, born and raised in Canada, ⁓ did an undergrad in political science, loved it, ⁓ did a master's degree in public administration, was destined to become a Canadian government federal public servant, born and raised in Ottawa, so like government town. And I realized I didn't want to sort of commit to that path. ⁓ And so when I was doing that,

Rebecca Taylor (08:27)
Hahaha.

Mm-hmm.

Todd Mayhew (08:51)
masters of public administration degree. I met a lot of people doing an HR master's degree. was called a masters of industrial relations and they were all getting fantastic jobs and big private sector organizations. So I thought, you know, I'm going to stick around for an additional year, get that master's degree as well. And that really launched my career in HR. The doctorate came along later in life. I did that and graduated in 2020, right before COVID blew up. But I did that because I

Rebecca Taylor (09:16)
Mm.

Todd Mayhew (09:20)
when I rolled the tape back when I finished my second master's degree, I wanted to do my PhD, was accepted to the University of Toronto, but it was dirt poor ⁓ and couldn't afford it at the time. But it was something I always knew I wanted to go back and just finish. like I could do it, wanted to do it. And I'll tell you, I thoroughly enjoyed the program I did at USC. It's a doctorate in organizational change and leadership. And it was just a phenomenal experience, fantastic faculty and classmates. Can't say enough good things about it. Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (09:47)
That's cool. That's cool.

And how does that, how do you think that influences your leadership style? You know, especially, I know you're five months into your role, so I'm sure you're still kind of learning the people, learning the things, you know, it takes time to really kind of get to the nitty gritty of who people are and how they operate, especially when you're meeting them in a period of change. So how does, you know, what you learned in that area kind of make your leadership style unique?

Todd Mayhew (10:13)
Yeah, mean, look, in the program that I completed, we were exposed to multiple models of leadership and organizational change. The thing you have to worry about is not coming across as like a ivory tower sort of egghead, right? And you have to, in any organization, you have to, when you join, you have to show value, right? And, you know, kind of small wins initially. So I'm always very mindful of that, of not, you know, just sort of coming across as the, know, ivory tower, you know, person who can't really execute.

Rebecca Taylor (10:25)
Yeah.

Todd Mayhew (10:39)
But I tell you the degree was super helpful in terms of giving me like language about why we should do certain things, right? Like it's no mistake that, you know, it's no, it's just a reality that organizations are often led by CFOs, you know, people with their CPA, finance people, engineers who don't often think from a people lens, not because they're bad. It's just not what their sort of their backgrounds, their disciplines.

What I found with the doctorate, it's it's given me that much more language and analytic capability to meet them at their level, right? And respond with facts, data, not just theory and, you know, kind of ethereal stuff, but hey, like here are the empirical studies and sort of, you know, kind of being able to give them facts, data, research to support, you know, any kind of suggestions I might make. So yeah, it's maybe I think I love the program and maybe I think a better HR executive.

Rebecca Taylor (11:33)
Yeah, that's great, because that's kind of the thing that can sometimes be really hard in HR is you work so much with finance, and finance is important, right? Businesses exist to make money. We understand that. That's obviously clear. The same way, you know, you have a business that you have consumers as your main customer. You know, it's easy if you kind of break down your business into a spreadsheet or a mathematical equation, but the hard part is getting people to find you and then helping people to trust that you're the right solution. And all of that is in the psychology of, you know, of all the different...

parts of what make people people. And it's the part that I could probably nerd out about for a really long time, but we don't have time for that. Yeah. And so...

Todd Mayhew (12:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would yeah, yeah,

I would just like build on your point. I say, you know, I've heard this said before, and I repeat it, you know, a business strategy without a people strategies is a pipe dream. And often, you know, you get leaders who build a really elegant ⁓ business strategy, but the numbers make sense. And you we don't get the market seems to be there, you know, all the right things. But then they don't think it all the way through. And that's

Rebecca Taylor (12:20)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Todd Mayhew (12:32)
I think the task of every HR leader is to sit down and say, all right, okay, this all sounds good. Now, now the people, what are we going to do? Or should we even do this because we've got massive human capital constraints, right? We just don't have that expertise and that capability. So that is a key role for an HR leader to bring that lens to the table and shape strategy, because sometimes what might look good on paper, if you can't put the human capital back it up, again, it's a pipe dream. So yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (12:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And I

think it's, there's the, thing that I've always kind of seen in that, you know, I float around in a lot of HR communities and I, you know, in my previous role, we did a lot with our clients who were working on employees who were accessing coaching and all these other things. And the hardest part that we always had to try to solve for was in getting people to change behavior. So getting people to, you know, part of the battle might've been accessing data, whether it was performance data, recruiting data, you know, business data, you know, whatever that is, but.

I think that there's a little bit more that is sort of solving the data access problem now just because actually thanks to AI, it does make sort of reporting and things like that more accessible. But the hard part is now still, I think, in driving behavior change and getting people to do things either differently, sometimes change their attachment to the way things were done before to embrace it now. So do you see that challenge in what you're doing now too? Or do you have other even bigger challenges and bigger fish to fry that you're facing right now?

Todd Mayhew (13:56)
You know, lots of challenges, but I'll pick up the one that you know, sort of teed up around, you know, AI and adoption and change management. I've, you know, obviously listened to a number of your podcasts and virtually every one of your speakers, you know, delves into AI. So I feel I must as well. I would describe it this way. mean, AI is a lot like exercise, especially as you think about New Year's resolution, Everyone's talking about it. Not too many people are actually doing it and even fewer people are doing it well. Right? So I...

Rebecca Taylor (14:11)
You have to.

Hmm.

I like that.

Todd Mayhew (14:26)
Yeah, I think ⁓ we are, again, as a fintech, I've appreciated how cutting edge ⁓ Snap Finance is trying to be with AI. ⁓ And we have an enterprise license for Chat, Chibuti and other solutions as well. ⁓ And it's required me to level up as an HR leader ⁓ in AI because my prior organization was a little bit more conservative, happy to kind of lag the industry. ⁓ And so, you know, I've made a point of attending

know, CHRO sessions with leaders and hearing what they're grappling with. And, you know, my own personal journey was fascinating. I heard this one CHRO talk about, you know, he was in a resource constrained environment. ⁓ He needed LND help and he decided to treat, you know, chat GPT like his director of learning development. So he said, I, every week I would spend time with it. I would coach it. I would give it feedback. I would give it more data, more input, you know, course correct.

And over time I developed, had a, I had a role robot as my head of learning and development. And I, and I was out of necessity. And he said that led him to realize that, ⁓ that AI is actually not a technology tool. It's really more of an HR tool. And if you think about the things that people have to do with AI around onboarding it, ⁓ training it, coaching it, developing it, performance, it, ⁓ sometimes offboarding it and terminating it. Right. Those are HR skills. Those aren't it skills. Right. So.

That was really revealing for me. And I've, since used AI myself as a kind of a virtual kind of, ⁓ analyst to help me with some deliverables that my CEO was asked for. So I needed to, you know, if I want to lead from the front with my executive colleagues, ⁓ I need to do walk the talk and learn it and use it. and so that's been part of the behavior change. I need, I needed to start from within and model it and then get my leadership team bought in. And now we have an initiative in 2026.

to not only train, but to really highlight where we're showing kind of meaningful adoption and how it's driving efficiency. we're all working on the same stuff. And there's such a wealth of information circulating on how best to do it.

Rebecca Taylor (16:26)
Yes. Yeah.

Yeah, I love the learning out loud part. think that's the part that's just initiatives will fail if you're coming in and telling your employees, this is how you use these tools and this is exactly what they're great for. And here are pros and cons. think people can see right through that, right? Because the technology has only been around so long. It changes so often that if you knew what you were doing six months ago, unless you've kept up to speed with it, your knowledge is out of date anyway. And the learning out loud part I think is a really...

It's, in my experience, is a good way to build trust between your employees too. Because then they see, okay, Todd's figuring it out as he goes. It gives me the confidence to figure it out as I go. And then your conversations with employees can be more about, here's what we're learning, here's what we're doing, here's what it's showing, and not the, you know, this is how we're mastering this. Because if you consider yourself a master, then you're immediately becoming, you know, it's like the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? It's like you think you know a lot and then you're in the valley of...

Todd Mayhew (17:27)
Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (17:29)
What is it? It was called the Valley of Ashes, but that's great Gatsby. I digress.

Todd Mayhew (17:31)
I'm not quite sure

what it is, I'm tracking with you.

Rebecca Taylor (17:39)
Yeah, value of despair, that's what it is. When you realize

it's like you don't know as much as you thought you did and then you're like, my god, I'm an imposter. There it is.

Todd Mayhew (17:44)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Where, you know, I'd say that one thing too, that's been wonderful for me is I've gotten to know employees throughout the organization. Some of them are what they're doing is just so incredible. Right. And it's, know, when you see how they're using it and you, you know, it just triggers ideas. Right. So, um, that's, that's a big focus for us and then our internal communications is sort of really highlighting, like, here's how Rebecca has figured out a way to kind of save time in her day and look at, you know, and actually

Rebecca Taylor (18:03)
Yeah.

Todd Mayhew (18:13)
video and share it, share these really powerful stories.

Rebecca Taylor (18:17)
Yeah, and it builds more

trust in the technology. think we're, you know, everyone talks about the fear of hallucinations in AI and all this. And I'm like, I don't know, I've been dealing with technology that's been hallucinating for years. We've all been complaining about autocorrect, right? How many times do you type something and, you know, your phone just makes up a completely different word that you weren't using. Everybody knows what a typo is. Everybody knows that sometimes autocorrect decides you're going to use the wrong there. And you don't, you know, people can use context clues and the human discernment to understand what that text means.

Todd Mayhew (18:28)
Right.

Rebecca Taylor (18:47)
I think AI hallucinations right now are basically the equivalent of a typo. Yes, it might take a little bit more skill to kind of understand and vet the context and everything, but when it becomes something that you can just embrace as a natural part of using the technology, I think that it makes it a little bit less scary. And now it's the part where people just have to kind of be a little bit more, I guess, comfortable with that side of knowing that it might not work out the way you think it would.

Todd Mayhew (19:13)
Yep, agreed. Agreed. I would say that ⁓ I have found personally that ⁓ AI augments your capabilities, but if you don't have those baseline capabilities, AI won't help you. Like it can't compensate for, like if you don't know the right questions to ask, or you don't have enough, whatever acumen, financial acumen or analytic acumen to test whether or not you're getting AI hallucinations, then it's dangerous, right? So.

Rebecca Taylor (19:40)
Yeah.

Todd Mayhew (19:40)
I would

just sort of say to our HR colleagues, if you think AI is gonna supplement a lack of capability around like analytic acumen, for instance, or financial acumen, it won't, right? It'll help you improve what you already have, but it's not gonna compensate for big skill gaps. as a community, in my career, HR people tend not to be the most analytically oriented. that's sweeping generalization. You'll find really talented analytic people, but generally speaking,

you know, it's not the skill set that you find. And so I just sort of continue to say, if you're to look to AI to kind of help, you know, kind of correct that deficit and skills and you're like, it won't, you know, so that's just my observation so far. Yeah.

Rebecca Taylor (20:23)
Yeah,

I agree. It's kind of like garbage in, garbage out. If you're just amplifying, if you're growing a poisonous plant, the plant's still poisonous, right? It might be robust, but it's not going to be great for you. Yeah. Well, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining. I think there's a lot of really good tidbits coming out of this conversation that people can use too. Do you any closing thoughts or any parting words you want to share before we go?

Todd Mayhew (20:27)
Yes.

Exactly. Yeah.

No, other than, ⁓ know what, ⁓ we're in turbulent times. ⁓ It's a wonderful, I've spent the vast, vast, vast majority of my career in HR. I had the opportunity to leave the function for few years. I came back because I missed it so much. It's a wonderful time to be in HR and an HR leader. There's just such an array of interesting, challenging, transformational things happening in society, happening in organizations. And I just love the diversity of things we get to do in any given day. And so.

Hopefully if people are listening to this and ⁓ they're looking for inspiration, I would say you've chosen the right career path because ⁓ to me there's nothing better in industry than HR.

Rebecca Taylor (21:30)
Yes, I cannot not endorse that enough. Thank you so much. Well, thank you, Todd. Thank you, everybody, for listening. And catch us next time with our next episode of HR Voices. Bye.

Todd Mayhew (21:35)
You bet.

Thank you very much.