Fintech FIS Nabs New Compliance Head as Company Prepares Job Cuts
Frederick Reynolds III started a week ago and also holds the title of deputy general counsel for regulatory affairs, Caroline Tsai, the company’s chief legal officer, said in an email.
Reynolds had most recently been chief compliance officer at Brex Inc., a corporate credit card startup founded in 2017 by two Brazilian college dropouts that earlier this year saw its valuation hit $12 billion.
FIS will fire thousands of employees as it prepares to usher in a new chief executive and deal with a falling stock price and challenging business environment, Bloomberg reported on November 22.
Tsai, who joined FIS earlier this year from Western Union Co., said Reynolds is taking on a “newly consolidated leadership role” reporting to her and replacing two people who are retiring at the end of the year.
“His experience is a perfect blend of regulatory, compliance and legal expertise with financial institutions and the payments industry,” she said.
Reynolds began his career as an associate at Texas-based law firm Winstead and Gardere Wynne Sewell, now part of Foley & Lardner, before going on to work at the U.S. Treasury Department, Bank of America Corp., and Barclays, where he was the banking giant’s top cop to combat economic crime.
He also spent three years as a prosecutor in Palau, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean. Reynolds did not respond to a request for comment.
Brex changes
Reynolds left Brex after the company recruited a new top lawyer in October in Ryan Loh, most recently general counsel for Bolt Financial Inc., a payments startup that parted ways with its former CEO in January after securing an $11 billion valuation.
Loh revealed his departure from Bolt on LinkedIn in September, the same month Bolt called off its planned $1.5 billion acquisition of Wyre Payments Inc., a cryptocurrency infrastructure provider. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Amanda Bradley, a former associate general counsel for corporate affairs at Bolt, said via email that she succeeded Loh as chief legal officer. Bradley also confirmed that Bolt hired Nguyen Vu, a former lawyer for Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc., earlier this year to lead product, privacy, compliance and intellectual property rights.
At Brex, Loh has taken over a top legal role vacated by Kathryn “Katie” Biber, a former general counsel for Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) ultimately unsuccessful 2012 U.S. presidential campaign.
Biber left Brex in June to become chief legal officer of cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm Operations LP. Under Biber’s leadership, Brex spent the past two years doubling the size of its legal and compliance staff, including hiring former chief privacy officer Conway Ekpo from Morgan Stanley.
Ekpo, who started a networking group for black lawyers in Big Law, remains an assistant general counsel at Brex. Gabriel Ledeen, who spent the past half-dozen years in legal roles at Meta and self-driving car startup Cruise LLC, succeeded Expo as the company’s chief privacy officer earlier this year.
In August, Brex saw former product and regulatory counsel Emily Goodman leave to become top counsel for HQ Digital LLC, a wealth management platform owned by Digital Currency Group Inc., a venture capital firm focused on the digital asset industry.
Brex announced last month that it plans to cut 11% of its workforce — 136 workers — in a corporate restructuring that leaves the company with about 1,150 employees.
The company did not respond to a request for comment on personnel matters.
