Curtis Campbell and the business of being believed

An old car does not care who runs H&R Block. Its owner can have a board seat, a product strategy and a calendar full of consequential meetings. The car still requires someone to attend to the machinery. Curtis Campbell likes working on old cars. Alongside gardening and family travel, it is one of the details that makes his executive biography feel inhabited.

There is a temptation to make this hobby explain everything. Resist it. Nobody earns the right to run a tax company by locating a replacement part. Still, the detail is appealing in a career spent close to the machinery of modern life: personal computers, cloud services, financial software and, eventually, the systems people use to file their taxes.

Campbell became H&R Block’s president and chief executive on January 1, 2026. He arrived with experience inside several companies whose products ask users to trust something they cannot easily inspect. Most people will never examine the infrastructure behind a cloud service. Few approach a tax return hoping for an educational adventure. They want the thing to work, and someone to explain it when it does not.

The education before the tax desk

His route begins, professionally, with a business administration degree from The Citadel, where he graduated in 1994. He later earned a Master of International Business Studies at the University of South Carolina and participated in Harvard Business School’s General Management Program. The educational mix matters because his subsequent work refused to remain inside one neat occupational drawer.

At Dell, he spent more than a decade in engineering and product leadership. His responsibilities included the OptiPlex line of business desktops. It was technology intended to become part of somebody else’s working day: purchased, deployed and expected to behave itself. A business computer has a modest social ambition. Ideally, its user spends very little time thinking about it.

Amazon Web Services came next in the progression described in his professional biographies, with Campbell leading product work in cloud computing. His public résumé includes an AWS Solutions Architect certification issued in 2012. That is a useful footnote beside the senior titles. It records a technical qualification in a career often summarized with the broad word “leadership.”

By March 2014, he was at Intuit, where his executive responsibilities encompassed product, innovation, strategy and analytics. In March 2017, he moved to Capital One’s consumer auto business. Hardware, infrastructure, software, lending: the industries changed, but the work kept returning to the meeting between a complicated operation and its customer.

A familiar problem, a different return

TaxAct appointed Campbell president in November 2018. In April 2020, his remit expanded to president of TaxAct and Software at its parent, Blucora. The move placed him inside a business where product design meets an unusually unforgiving calendar. A tax-filing service must be ready when people need it, including people who have delayed needing it until the last possible moment.

He led TaxAct through its 2022 sale by Blucora and continued through 2023. H&R Block later credited his five-year tenure with double-digit revenue growth. That description gives the period a measurable business outcome without requiring the story to turn every change in ownership into a personal triumph. A chief executive leads an organization; an organization contains many people doing the work.

The accounts of colleagues add texture. Recommendations on his public professional profile describe a leader who gave people responsibility while helping them develop. Those are assessments by people who worked with him, rather than personality test results. They are useful because they describe the day-to-day experience behind the job titles: direction, room to act and attention to the people carrying out the plan.

Recognition accumulated along the way. His résumé lists Intuit’s CEO Leadership Award in 2016 and Capital One’s Chairman’s Award in 2018. In 2023, The Citadel selected him for its business-school Hall of Fame as a Leader of Principle. The graduate of 1994 had become someone the school wanted future graduates to meet. He also maintains a connection to The Citadel through its business school’s advisory board.

The second chair becomes the first

H&R Block announced Campbell’s appointment in January 2024, specifying that he would join after that tax season. He came aboard in May as president of global consumer tax and chief product officer. The paired titles were revealing. He would oversee the consumer tax business while also shaping how the company managed products across the enterprise.

The geographical brief included the United States, Canada and Australia. The operational brief included customers and tax professionals. Those two audiences make the product challenge particularly interesting: the person buying help and the person providing it both need the system to make sense. An improvement that pleases one while frustrating the other can simply move the difficulty across the desk.

In August 2025, the board announced that he would succeed Jeff Jones. The decision was unanimous. Jones, who had led the company since 2017, would retire at the end of December and remain a strategic adviser through September 2026. Campbell would become chief executive and join the board at the start of the new year.

The arrangement allowed time for a handoff. It also placed Campbell in the position of carrying forward work already underway. H&R Block’s investments in digital tax services, small-business offerings and financial products predated his presidency. His responsibility was to decide how an established organization would keep improving them. Continuity can demand as much judgment as a fresh start, with fewer opportunities for a dramatic entrance.

“We’re in the business of trust and confidence.”

Curtis Campbell

What a customer is buying

The line is a concise description of the human stakes in his assignment. A tax appointment involves information people may not casually share elsewhere. The preparer sees the numbers; the customer brings the life that produced them. Technology has to work inside that encounter, where accuracy and a useful explanation belong to the same experience.

The scale adds another complication. H&R Block describes a global business serving more than 20 million clients through a network that includes more than 70,000 tax professionals. Those figures give the corporate purpose a demanding denominator. A useful change has to reach people whose circumstances differ, through colleagues whose daily work the chief executive cannot personally supervise. This makes product management a problem of communication inside the company as well as outside it. The idea must survive the journey from a planning discussion to the person who needs to use it.

Campbell’s background makes the technology part of the story easy to see. The harder part is holding the customer’s perspective alongside it. From the executive office, a service can appear as a sequence of processes. Across the desk, it arrives as a series of questions: What do you need from me? What happens next? Have I understood the answer?

His job contains both views. H&R Block operates through tax professionals as well as digital products. Better software can change the work a professional has time to do. Better explanations can change how a customer experiences that software. The quality of the relationship and the quality of the product meet in practical details, including the handoff when a customer needs more help.

A first set of numbers, with the calendar attached

By August 2026, Campbell was presenting results for a fiscal year that had begun under Jones and ended under him. Revenue reached about $3.95 billion, up 4.9%. The date boundary matters: he became CEO halfway through the year. The figures describe the company’s performance across that whole period, including the work of his predecessor and the wider team.

In discussing those results, he emphasized the composition of the client base and the role of testing and experimentation. The language fits a product executive: observe what happens, learn from it and expand what works. It also creates a practical test for the next period. The usefulness of an experiment lies in what changes after the results arrive.

There is another financial-technology perspective in his career. Since July 2021, he has served on the board of Jack Henry & Associates, which supplies technology to financial institutions. That role puts governance alongside operating experience. The systems behind a financial service may remain invisible to its customer, but somebody must remain responsible for how reliably they function.

Leave room for the person

Then there are the things that do not fit neatly on a chart. The old cars. The gardening. Traveling with family. These interests need no elaborate business justification. It is enough that a person whose work involves large organizations also spends time with things that grow slowly or occasionally refuse to start.

Campbell’s professional story has covered a considerable distance without losing its connection to ordinary use. A desktop should let someone get on with the day. A financial product should help someone complete a task they care about. A tax service should leave a customer able to move forward with the result. The setting changes; the expectation remains wonderfully stubborn.

At H&R Block, he has inherited the responsibility for making that expectation hold across an organization. The work will be judged in reported results, but it also happens in smaller encounters that never reach an earnings presentation: a question answered clearly, an unnecessary step removed, a conversation given enough time. Somewhere between the machinery and the person using it is the job Curtis Campbell has kept finding.