When Perry Beberman arrived at what is now Bread Financial, the company had a balance sheet problem. It was carrying too much leverage, had insufficient capital, and needed a more disciplined approach to funding its lending business. For a finance executive who had spent decades navigating consumer credit cycles, the assignment was familiar territory. The scale of the transformation, however, would demand patience.
Today, Beberman points to a substantially different financial foundation. Bread has paid down more than 70% of its parent-company debt, built capital beyond established targets, and shifted direct-to-consumer deposits from less than 5% of funding in 2020 to more than half.
The changes have given Bread greater capacity to invest in technology, support growth, and return capital to shareholders.
Still, Beberman is quick to explain that financial discipline is not simply about strengthening a balance sheet. At Bread, whose products include co-branded credit cards, private-label cards, and installment lending, the daily challenge is balancing the ambitions of retail partners with the economics of consumer credit.
Retailers want more approvals. Credit executives must manage losses. Finance must determine where the returns justify the risk.
“They collide all the time,” Beberman says of those competing priorities.
For him, such disagreements are not organizational failures. They are essential to making better decisions.
That philosophy also shapes Bread’s adoption of AI, its continuing finance transformation, and its approach to capital allocation. Technology may accelerate analysis and automate routine work, but Beberman sees little reason to surrender judgment.
After nearly four decades in finance, his operating principle remains remarkably consistent: growth matters, but only when the economics support it.
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CFOTL: For someone new to Bread Financial, what does the business provide today, and where do you see the opportunity headed?
Beberman: We’re a tech-forward, data-driven, customer-focused organization. It’s a financial services company that offers co-brand, private-label credit cards, pay-over-time products, and a number of savings offerings. We’re in a variety of industry verticals, from travel, entertainment, beauty, jewelry, specialty apparel. One of our newest ones is furniture.
One of the ways I describe our company is we’re nimble and gritty. We’ll do whatever it takes to meet our partners’ needs.
CFOTL: Bread has reshaped both its business and its funding profile. What’s mattered most in its transformation?
Beberman: When I started, we were significantly overlevered and way undercapitalized. Through discipline and focus, we established enterprise capital policies, plans, targets, and rigorous capital management discipline.
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We’ve paid down over 70% of our parent debt. We built capital to the point where we’ve exceeded established targets. Not only can we fund ourselves and fund responsible, sustainable growth, we’re able to invest in new capabilities, and we’ve actually been able to return capital to shareholders.
CFOTL: You’ve been managing credit carefully while pursuing growth. Can you tell us about a decision where those priorities collided?
Beberman: They collide all the time. We have a chief revenue officer who’s responsible for growing the existing partnerships, and those retailers want us to underwrite deeper, say yes to more of their customers. Credit is responsible for making sure that we are managing towards our long-term loss targets.
Finance has to play in the middle and find the sweet spot of the return, to make sure we get the right return on equity for our shareholders.
You can’t have one area dictating what the right answer is. We come together as a group and figure out what is the right balance.
CFOTL: Where are you seeing the clearest value when it comes to AI?
Beberman: It frees teams to focus on higher-value decisions, and it’s across everything we do. In finance, it accelerates how we can forecast, do scenario planning, trend analysis. It automates our controls and audits.
For us, it’s not replacing human judgment. AI really augments it. So we get the decisions faster, more informed, more predictive.