James McHale – Tower Federal Credit Union

James McHale was not supposed to be on that train from Milan to Venice. Neither was the woman across from him. It was a first-time trip through Northern Italy, the kind of connection travelers forget within a week, except this one lasted. She was Italian, he was a young American with a background in finance and no real plan for where life would take him next, and somewhere between stations they struck up a conversation that turned into a marriage, a family and, decades later, a standing joke about how the best decisions are rarely the ones anyone plans for.

James McHale | Tower Federal Credit Union | Senior Vice President & CFO

That same willingness to take the unplanned path has defined McHale’s three-decade career in credit unions, one that has carried him from a controller’s office in California to the chief financial officer’s seat at Tower Federal Credit Union in Laurel, Maryland.

A career he did not know existed

McHale did not grow up dreaming of credit unions. He studied accounting and financial management at New Mexico State University, the son of a Navy father who moved the family up and down the West Coast before settling in New Mexico long enough for McHale to finish school. When he interviewed for a controller position in California, he admits he did not fully understand what a credit union was.

That knowledge gap did not last long. McHale worked his way through a series of increasingly demanding roles, eventually becoming president and CEO of a credit union in California, then serving as chief Financial Officer, chief operations officer, and chief risk officer at institutions from California to Indiana before arriving at Tower in March 2023 from a nearly billion-dollar credit union in Michigan. Getting to the East Coast, he says, had been a personal and professional goal for years, one that also happened to shorten the flight to see his wife’s family in Italy.

Founded in 1953 with just seven members contributing $5 each, Tower Federal Credit Union has grown into one of the largest credit unions in Maryland, serving more than 222,000 members worldwide and managing more than $5 billion in assets. Headquartered in Laurel, the cooperative organization remains focused on its founding mission of supporting the financial well-being of its member-owners while investing in the communities it serves. Tower offers checking and savings accounts, youth accounts, loans and investment services, and through the TowerCares Foundation, it supports children in need along with military and civilian service personnel.

Early in his career, McHale assumed everyone around him wanted to eventually run the show.

“I was stunned when I found out that not everyone has that goal or dream,” McHale says.

The realization reshaped how he leads. Rather than measuring his team against his own ambitions, McHale says he tries to give people room to hit their own professional goals, at their own pace, while still moving the organization forward together.

Building for the next generation of members

Much of McHale’s current focus at Tower centers on technology, specifically ensuring the credit union is positioned to serve members who have grown up expecting digital-first service. Tower has replaced its digital banking platform, added an AI-driven agent capable of handling simple transactions, and is rolling out interactive teller machines, a newer generation of ATM technology that is becoming increasingly common across the credit union industry.

The stakes, McHale says, go beyond convenience. Credit union members are aging on average, and Tower is not immune to that trend. Younger consumers with fewer legacy ties to traditional banking are gravitating toward fintech competitors like SoFi and Rocket Mortgage, companies that offer speed and ease but not the same regulatory oversight as a federally chartered credit union.

McHale estimates that roughly 40 percent of Tower’s deposits will need to be replaced over the next two decades as members age and their wealth transfers to children and grandchildren. Capturing that generational shift, rather than losing it to less-regulated competitors, is a driving force behind the credit union’s digital investment.

“We’re automating functions and implementing AI where it is trusted, practical, and advantageous,” McHale says.

Despite the scale of that automation, McHale does not anticipate it will shrink Tower’s workforce. Instead, he points to his own accounting department, which has gone from 20 employees to seven while handling a greater workload, as evidence that technology can free staff to take on more strategic responsibilities rather than eliminate their jobs outright.

Staying disciplined on risk

Growth and innovation at Tower are balanced by a deliberate risk approach. McHale meets biweekly with the credit union’s risk management team and participates in quarterly sessions where senior leadership updates a risk scorecard and identifies the organization’s biggest exposures. Over the past several years, Tower has moved away from relying on insurance to absorb risk and has instead built out its own compliance tracking and mitigation efforts.

Vendor relationships receive similar scrutiny. McHale oversees vendor management for the credit union and requires that partners store data domestically, a standard shaped in part by Tower’s long relationship with the Department of Defense. Because the credit union typically commits to vendor partnerships lasting five to seven years, he says the selection process is intentionally thorough.

“You can’t get into a paralysis by analysis situation,” McHale says. “If you have 70% or 80% confidence, that is the time to be prepared to pull the trigger.”

That comfort with calculated risk extends to how McHale evaluates his own team. He says some employees underestimate their own abilities simply because they have not yet been pushed.

“Some people don’t know how good they are until they’re challenged,” McHale says.

Leading through relationships, not just numbers

Despite the emphasis on data, McHale describes his current role as defined more by people than by spreadsheets. He supervises four functional areas at Tower and tells his leadership team that developing staff matters is just as important as closing the books each month, a cycle the finance team now completes in a day and a half.

“Successes are more often validation or affirmation of what you already thought was true. Failures are quality checks that guide necessary revisions and retooling,” McHale says.

He tries to keep that philosophy from becoming performative. Staff earns his trust over time, he says, just as he has had to earn theirs, and he is careful to separate being a good manager from trying to be everyone’s friend.

Outside the office, McHale keeps a similar boundary. He rarely talks about work at home, choosing instead to focus on travel with his wife, who is also a CFO, and the kind of experiences that do not show up on a balance sheet. He is a frequent flyer who admits he still tracks the miles as closely as the dollars, but the family road trips, he says, are the investments that matter most.

That same instinct, chasing the experience rather than the safe bet, is what put him on an unscheduled train in Milan all those years ago. It is also, in his telling, what continues to guide Tower Federal Credit Union as it modernizes for a generation of members it has not yet fully met: move deliberately, stay grounded in the mission, and trust that the right connections, whether with technology or with people, tend to pay off over time.