About Fred Cadena

Fred Cadena helped disrupt retail wealth management before learning what it feels like from the other side. As an early executive at optionsXpress, running market risk and operations technology modernization, he helped a Chicago startup pull retail investors away from the traditional brokerage model. Then low rates, thin trading volume, and regulatory change did to optionsXpress roughly what optionsXpress had done to everyone else, and Charles Schwab acquired the company in 2011 for about $1 billion.

Fred has been professionally preoccupied with what happens next ever since.

That question carried him through leadership roles at Accenture, Capgemini, and IBM, where he spent a decade helping large banks and credit unions rebuild their customer experience on Salesforce and the rest of the modern MarTech stack. He came away convinced that the technology is almost never the constraint. Today he is SVP, Managing Principal at Vericast, where he works with C-suite leaders at banks and credit unions on the least forgiving problem in the business: getting someone to move their money to you, and then getting them to stay.

Most of that work runs on data. Fred's 2026 analysis of 48,000 acquisition campaigns across more than 800 financial institutions produced a finding he is glad to argue about: an offer strong enough to move someone is strong enough to move them again. A good offer opens the door. It has never been the reason anyone stayed.

Which points at the thing he actually believes, and which sits oddly beside a career spent in data: banking is deeply human. The model can find the right person, and the offer can get them through the door. Whether they are still there in three years has almost nothing to do with either. It comes down to whether anyone gave them a reason that wasn't a number.

Fred hosts the Banking on Disruption podcast, which covers banking, fintech, and the Salesforce ecosystem, and co-founded Banker's Book Club. He lives in Boulder County, Colorado, where he keeps notes on every wine he tries and has yet to find the data that explains why the same bottle is better on a Friday than it was on a Tuesday.