#peter aceto

#18 Peter Aceto, CEO at CannTrust Holdings

Corporate Bio

Mr. Peter Ralph Aceto is the Chief Executive Officer of CannTrust Holdings Inc. since October 1, 2018. He is a globally recognized and respected business leader, author and speaker. Prior to joining CannTrust, Mr. Aceto was the President and CEO of Tangerine (formerly ING DIRECT). His leadership proved particularly instrumental in the 2012 $3.1 billion acquisition of ING DIRECT by Scotiabank. Mr. Aceto was one of the founding members of ING DIRECT, and held the posts of Chief Risk Officer, Chief of Staff and Chief Lending Officer at ING DIRECT in the US where he worked for nearly eight years.

Mr. Aceto is globally recognized and a seasoned professional who brings decades of significant experience in leading companies in the public markets. Previously, for 10 years, Mr. Aceto was President & CEO of Tangerine Bank (formerly, ING Direct); held the positions of Chief Risk Officer, Chief of Staff and Chief Lending Officer at ING DIRECT in the U.S., and was Legal and General Counsel at ING DIRECT in Canada. Mr. Aceto also served as a Director at Tangerine Investment Management Inc. Mr. Aceto is the co-Founder of eQuo and serves as mentor and advisor to several Canadian startups within the financial technology space, including TribalScale’s Fintech Venture Studio, NestReady, Senso.ai, Every Financial and others.

Mr. Aceto is a globally sought out public speaker on transformative leadership. He is the author of The Globe and Mail’s bestseller book WEOLOGY: How everybody wins when we comes before me. He is also a social media leader and a blogger. Mr. Aceto is frequently featured in The Globe and Mail, Harvard Business Review, Forbes and Huffington Post. Mr. Aceto is a Board Member of the Sinai Health System Foundation.

He is a Board Member for UNITY Charity, and a Member of the Council of Governors of iCanada dedicated to helping Canada become a world leading "intelligent nation." Mr. Aceto has been awarded for his leadership in HR, design, communication and business, as well as his contribution to Canada and his community.

Social Media Links:      Twitter      Linked In     Instagram

How did you get involved with the Cannabis Industry?

What is your biggest accomplishment to date in the Cannabis Industry?

What are your future goals?

Who/what Inspires you?

This is one of the best examples I've seen of a company using social media well in Canada - starting at the top!

Amplify’d from m.theglobeandmail.com

ING's Peter Aceto sees value in a good tweet

RICHARD BLACKWELL

Last updated Monday, Feb. 14, 2011 11:28AM EST

On Feb. 3, Peter Aceto marked his second anniversary as a regular Twitter user. In tech-savvy Canada that might seem like no big deal, except that he also happens to be chief executive officer of an important financial institution. But ING Direct is not your average bank. For 14 years it has been a scrappy innovator, using the latest technology to sell its consumer-friendly financial products, such as savings accounts, RRSPs and mortgages. Mr. Aceto, who was the eighth ING employee hired when he joined the Dutch-owned startup as a legal counsel in 1996, now leads a staff of 1,100 at ING Direct Canada. His company has 1.7 million retail customers.

How did you get started on Twitter, where you now have almost 4,500 followers?

It really started in a meeting with a handful of employees. We were talking about trends and social media. I immediately went home and did my own research on Twitter. I set up an account and I began to tweet. I have grown to really enjoy the process. You can’t tweet six or seven times a day unless you genuinely think there’s something interesting about it.

How do you still get your “day” job done?

There are not enough hours in the day [for everything], so you have to pick the things that really matter. [Tweeting helps in] communicating with employees and potential customers … demonstrating our honesty and transparency, and revealing that I’m not a stereotypical CEO, but actually just a normal person.

Do you learn much from following others’ tweets?

I follow people who focus on leadership development or coaching, or on exploring the definition of leadership, or who are sharing best practices on how to be a good leader. We’re an innovative company and I’m personally interested in innovation and technology, and a lot of people who are really thinking about what’s new are there [on Twitter]. We also have a lot of customers who interact with us this way, so I get real-time feedback on what’s going well and what’s not going well.

That’s a pretty public place to deal with problems, isn’t it?

If you’ve got the guts to have that conversation in front of everyone, it says to a lot to people that you have nothing to hide, and that if you make a mistake you’re going to deal with it properly.

How have you used social media to help refine new products?

We launched our Thrive chequing account in a very social way. We invited 10,000 customers to try it first and interact with us in its final development stages. We got thousands of bits of feedback through e-mail, Twitter and our Facebook page.

As a new generation of CEOs take the reins, will we see more using social media?

Yes. I’m just in the early stages of what is going to emerge as the best practice for how CEOs communicate with their employees and customers. Our customers notice it and they love it.

Would you advise all CEOs to use Twitter?

No. If you don’t think it’s the right thing to do and you don’t want to share in this manner, but you do it [anyway], people will figure you out. People can see right though it if you are lying or if someone else is writing your tweets for you.

You took over as CEO just before the global financial crisis hit. Was that tough?

It was actually a very positive experience for me. It was very galvanizing for the team locally and there were a lot of lessons learned. We [now] spend a lot more time thinking about worst-case scenarios that we didn’t think were possible before: What you would do in those situations and how you would protect your customers, and how you would keep the regulator happy?

You’re a lawyer, but didn’t practise for long before you joined ING. How come?

Even in law school I found I was a bit of a square peg in a round hole. It is a profession of specialization, but I like a whole bunch of different things. And I didn’t really appreciate the way people were treated in the culture of law firms. Then I met Arkadi Kuhlmann, the founding CEO of ING Direct Canada, and I was so inspired with what he was going to build that I wanted to work for him.

Read more at m.theglobeandmail.com