Tom Ware has 35 years’ experience in small business lending, working with banks and finance companies. He began his career at a consulting firm that is now part of Oliver Wyman, and started in finance with a subsidiary of First Interstate Bancorp, the seventh largest U.S. bank at the time. He has held a variety of credit and general management positions, including Senior Vice President, Operations & Chief Credit Officer of American Express Equipment Finance. He became acquainted with PayNet as a potential customer, while serving as Vice President & General Manager of a billion-dollar business unit at CNH (Case) Capital Corporation, and began working at PayNet in 2001.

At PayNet, Mr. Ware was Senior Vice President, Analytics & Product Development, responsible for creating new products and services, including credit scores (such as the PayNet MasterScoreSM), predictive models (PayNet AbsolutePD®), and industry indices (the Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index, “SBLI”). He was also responsible for PayNet’s consulting services such as Strategic Business Reviews, Peer Lender Benchmarking and industry research, which appeared regularly at financial industry conferences and in the media, in the Wall Street Journal, American Banker, RMA Journal, Forbes, Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, ABC News, CNBC, Fox News, and Crain’s. It has also appeared in Congressional testimony, and been cited by Federal Reserve Governors.

In April 2019 PayNet was acquired by Equifax, and Mr. Ware left to start an independent consulting practice, Tom Ware Advisory Services, LLC. He is a Trustee of the Equipment Leasing & Finance Foundation, a member of its Executive Committee, and Chairman of its Research Committee. He is also a long-time member of the Equipment Leasing & Finance Credit & Collections Committee, and previously served on the Board of Governors of the Risk Management Association’s Washington D.C. & Maryland Chapter. He is a frequent contributor to Equipment Leasing Today and the Monitor, where he published as a three-part series of articles, “The 12 Secrets of Commercial Credit Scoring.” Mr. Ware received a BA with Distinction in Mathematical Economics from Dartmouth College and later earned an MBA from Harvard.