Elected: 2017, 2021
Current Term Ends: 2024
Committees: Audit, Finance & Investment
Michael Conover was elected as a term trustee in 2017, following his service as alumni trustee from 2014 to 2017. He holds a B.S. in finance from Ithaca College and for the past three decades has worked in the financial services industry. Recently retired as partner at KPMG LLC in New York and among other leadership roles, Mike was the founding partner of KPMG's financial risk management practice in the United States and served as the firm's National Sector Head for Capital Markets.
His financial services expertise includes: organizational governance, enterprise risk management, and setting risk appetite; due-diligence assistance for acquisitions and/or mergers, valuations, and branch sales; formation of numerous bank holding companies; regulator risk reviews and responding to negative regulatory exams; in-depth internal control reviews of operations; credit risk management, credit reviews, and credit process improvement; and identifying target operating models and process redesign opportunities.
Prior to joining KPMG in 1998, Mike spent seven years with another consulting firm, where he was responsible for providing financial advisory, regulatory, and risk management services to financial services companies in the United States.
Before entering the consulting world, he spent 10 years with two Wall Street investment banking firms specializing exclusively in corporate finance and capital markets for financial institutions. While an investment banker, Mike was involved in dozens of capital financing transactions for both financially troubled and healthy banks, government-assisted and non-assisted mergers and acquisitions, branch system rationalization, and balance sheet restructuring transactions including government-assisted transactions.
In 2009, Consulting magazine named him as one of the top 25 consultants of the year, and in 2005 Euromoney called him one of the leading financial services consultants in the world.
Mike has dedicated his time to the Ithaca College Alumni Association Board of Directors since 2011. He is involved in the life of the college in many other ways, too. Professionally, through his participation in the School of Business's Meet the Firms reception and his mentoring of students as part of the IC Mentoring Network, and personally, by opening his home for the college's new student welcome parties.
Mike and his wife, Kathleen, live in New Canaan, Connecticut. They have two children.