Jeremy Ford spent years preparing to come home. Wall Street, business school and private equity were stops along a route whose destination was already decided: Dallas, and a working life alongside his father. In 2019, he put it plainly: “All along, I was planning on coming back and working with my dad.”
Today, that destination looks more complicated. Ford is chairman, president and chief executive of Hilltop Holdings, the Dallas financial company whose businesses span Texas banking, home mortgages and municipal finance. He also runs its banking cornerstone, PlainsCapital. The family connection helped shape the enterprise. Its next chapter now includes a disagreement about how it should be governed.
Between those two points lies a career concerned with assembling businesses, deciding which belong together, and making the resulting organization work. A completed acquisition makes a tidy announcement. Getting the people, systems and responsibilities to fit takes rather longer.
A return with a purpose
Ford earned a finance degree at the University of Texas and an MBA in finance at Columbia Business School. His early employers included Salomon Smith Barney, California Federal Bank and Liberté Investors. These were places to encounter financial institutions from several angles: as operating businesses, investment opportunities and potential transactions.
From 2004 to 2008, he worked at Diamond A-Ford Corporation. He then became a principal at Ford Financial Fund before taking the president and CEO positions at Hilltop in March 2010. That sequence matters. His preparation included the work of evaluating investments before he became responsible for the everyday consequences of owning them.
Hilltop itself had already undergone a change of identity. Its predecessor, Affordable Residential Communities, owned manufactured home communities. The business sold those operating assets in 2007 and adopted the Hilltop name. Gerald J. Ford had invested in the company and joined its board in 2005. The financial-services group familiar today had to be built.
His connection to his undergraduate university has continued through its Development Board and the Longhorn Foundation. His company biography also has room for a declaration of Texas football loyalty. Even a finance résumé can accommodate a Saturday allegiance.
The acquisition that came with three businesses
The decisive purchase arrived in November 2012. Hilltop acquired PlainsCapital Corporation, bringing PlainsCapital Bank, mortgage originator PrimeLending and FirstSouthwest into the group. Instead of buying a bank and constructing every adjacent business from scratch, Hilltop acquired an organization that already combined several kinds of financial work.
Alan B. White, PlainsCapital’s chairman and CEO, continued leading its businesses and became Hilltop’s vice chairman. Jeremy remained Hilltop’s president and CEO. The arrangement preserved experienced operating leadership while placing the enterprise inside a different ownership structure. Keeping capable people was part of the transaction’s practical design.
For Ford, the purchase established the central relationship of his executive career: a holding company with a Texas bank at its core and businesses reaching customers elsewhere. A depositor, a homebuyer and a municipal finance client might encounter different names. Their business ultimately belonged to the same group.
The next additions changed the map again. In September 2013, PlainsCapital assumed all the deposits of First National Bank in Edinburg through an FDIC transaction. Growth here involved responsibility for existing customers and accounts at a failed institution. An acquisition could begin with a regulatory intervention rather than a conventional agreement between two continuing management teams.
In January 2015, Hilltop completed its acquisition of SWS Group. Its banking subsidiary merged into PlainsCapital, while the securities businesses helped form the group’s expanded brokerage operation. The eventual HilltopSecurities name brought FirstSouthwest and Southwest Securities together. The organization was becoming more interconnected, and more demanding to manage.
The work between the deals
In September 2016, Ford and White became co-CEOs. Their responsibilities were divided: White oversaw revenue-producing operations, while Ford took corporate functions including finance, risk, compliance, legal affairs and corporate development. PlainsCapital Corporation was also being integrated into the parent holding company.
The distinction is useful for understanding Ford’s career. Acquisitions attract attention because the change of ownership happens on an identifiable date. Corporate integration is a succession of less photogenic decisions: who approves something, who reports to whom, which resources are shared, and how operating companies receive support.
The 2016 changes put Ford directly over that machinery. Accounting and risk management do not often get celebratory photographs. They do, however, become rather interesting when they fail. Building a common corporate operation was an essential counterpart to buying businesses with their own identities.
White retired in April 2019, and Ford resumed serving as sole CEO. Their partnership had linked Hilltop’s acquisition strategy with the experience of the executive who founded PlainsCapital. It also showed that this company’s development involved several leadership transitions, spread across years, rather than a single ceremonial handover.
Ford’s acquisition record also includes The Bank of River Oaks in 2018, expanding PlainsCapital’s Houston presence. Yet the portfolio did not grow only by addition. In June 2020, Hilltop sold National Lloyds Corporation to Align Financial Holdings. The closing generated approximately $154.1 million in gross proceeds before expenses, subject to adjustments.
That sale removed the insurance business from the group. For an executive associated with acquisitions, a disposal is an equally revealing decision. A diversified company still has to decide where its boundaries belong. Keeping every business forever would be a collection policy, which is a different occupation.
Listening beyond the executive table
Ford’s current remit stretches across finance, legal affairs, risk, technology, information security, human resources and other holding-company functions. The breadth helps explain why the employee experience appears repeatedly in his public comments. An organization made through acquisitions has to give people reasons to feel they belong to the same enterprise.
In 2025, nearly 80 percent of Hilltop employees participated in its anonymous engagement survey, providing more than 9,800 comments. The company reported a 79 percent overall workplace experience score. Ford described the survey as a way to see what was working and where the organization could improve.
“I look forward to the results of our employee engagement survey each year”Jeremy Ford, August 2025
The numbers offer something more specific than an executive’s declaration that people matter. They describe a channel for feedback, with a substantial response. They do not settle every question about working life. They do show that management has material to read after the awards have been announced.
The community work has a similar practical side. During 2025, Hilltop employees recorded more than 1,500 volunteer hours, and employee and corporate contributions exceeded $3 million. The company offers volunteer time off and matches eligible charitable gifts. Those are group efforts, and their credit belongs with the employees and organizations doing the work.
There is a less formal expression of belonging, too. Hilltop’s buffalo mascot is called Mo, short for Momentum. In 2023, the company installed a bronze Mo at Hilltop Plaza, one of five commissioned sculptures by Bruce Greene. Ford welcomed the response from visitors and children. Banking has plenty of ratios; a buffalo gives people something easier to recognize.
A bigger title, a harder question
In May 2024, Ford became CEO of PlainsCapital Bank following Jerry Schaffner’s retirement. Brian Heflin became bank president. Ford’s responsibilities now reached directly into the operating bank as well as across its parent company, bringing him closer to the business that anchors Hilltop’s structure.
On April 24, 2025, he became Hilltop’s chairman. The board appointed a lead independent director when it combined the chairman and CEO positions. Gerald became chairman emeritus and subsequently resigned that position in July 2025. The formal succession was clear; agreement within the family proved more difficult.
On October 16, 2026, Gerald’s counsel asked the board to separate the chairman and CEO roles amid litigation involving Jeremy and his father. That was Gerald’s governance request, rather than a board decision or judicial finding. Hilltop’s stated governance approach permits combined roles with a lead independent director. The disagreement places the division of authority at the center of the company’s current family story.
Ford’s operating task continues alongside it. On October 22, Hilltop reported third-quarter income attributable to common stockholders of $24.9 million, compared with $45.8 million a year earlier. The group had $16.2 billion in assets at September’s end. Those figures describe a substantial institution facing a less comfortable quarter.
Rounded business results reported in Ford’s quarterly commentary. These are segment figures, not a reconciliation to consolidated net income.
The businesses pulled in different directions. PlainsCapital generated approximately $44 million in pretax income; PrimeLending lost approximately $11 million; HilltopSecurities earned approximately $7 million. Diversification gives Ford several sources of earnings. It also leaves him with several distinct problems to solve when interest rates move.
His route home led to responsibility for all of them. The original ambition was personal and easy to state. The job that followed requires decisions about customers, colleagues, capital and authority, inside a public company whose obligations extend well beyond the family. Sixteen years after becoming Hilltop CEO, Ford is still working through what that responsibility means.