Missouri’s financial services sector spans wealth management, mortgage lending, insurance, workforce solutions, and auto finance, and the security leaders protecting those organizations reflect that breadth. The financial services CISOs in this feature have built programs inside heavily regulated environments where client trust is the foundation of every business relationship and a security failure carries consequences that extend well beyond a data breach notification.
Michael Esson — Chief Information Security Officer, Plancorp
Michael Esson has spent nearly twenty years at Plancorp, a St. Louis-based financial planning and asset management firm, progressing from director of operations and compliance through chief compliance and information security officer before settling into the CISO role in 2022. That long operational and compliance tenure inside a wealth management firm gives him a grounded understanding of the regulatory environment, the client relationships, and the data sensitivity that define fiduciary financial services security. His background reflects the reality of security leadership at smaller financial firms: the CISO is often the person who built the compliance foundation first and grew into security ownership as the threat landscape demanded it.
Randy Raw — Chief Information Security Officer, Veterans United Home Loans
Randy Raw has spent nearly fifteen years at Veterans United Home Loans, moving from information security manager through director and VP of information security before stepping into the CISO role in May 2021. Before Veterans United, he spent more than six years as manager of network security at MOREnet, the Missouri Research and Education Network, and held technology leadership roles at Linn State Technical College and Osage County R-II School District going back to the early 1990s. That public sector and education technology foundation, combined with a decade and a half of building security inside a mortgage lender serving military families, gives him a career shaped by mission-driven organizations rather than purely commercial ones. He also runs SABERS Coaching, a leadership coaching practice focused on helping cybersecurity leaders communicate across generations, a practical acknowledgment that managing a multi-generational security team is itself a leadership discipline worth developing deliberately.
Travis Nichols — Chief Information Security Officer, Shelter Insurance
Before Travis Nichols ever worked in cybersecurity, he drove freight for UPS for thirteen years, unloading trucks on the third shift before working his way into dispatch, terminal operations, and eventually a long-haul route in Columbia, Missouri. He then spent five years as a systems developer at CARFAX, became an Agile coach at Veterans United Home Loans, transitioned into IS auditing, built the company’s risk management function, and served as information security manager before joining Shelter Insurance as director of information security in 2022. Travis Nichols stepped into the CISO role at Shelter in January 2026. That career arc, from freight dock to security executive, is not one you see often. What it reflects is a leader who developed operational discipline, people management skills, and technical fluency through direct experience rather than a traditional IT career path, and who has applied all of it to building a security program where risk measurement under the NIST CSF 2.0 framework is the north star for every decision.
Ryan Frillman — Chief Information Security Officer, Equifax Workforce Solutions
Ryan Frillman has built one of the more community-connected security profiles in Missouri. He serves as an adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis teaching enterprise cybersecurity leadership, has been an advisor and mentor at SixThirty CYBER for nearly a decade, serves on CompTIA’s technical advisory and executive advisory boards, and co-founded SAMRON Q, Inc. He has also served as chapter president of the Security Advisor Alliance and as adjunct faculty at Lindenwood University. His operational career spans senior cyber security engineer at MITRE supporting a DoD USTRANSCOM global program, director of information security at Spire Energy, cloud CISO at Netskope, technical and business information security roles at Equifax, and now CISO at Equifax Workforce Solutions. That combination of DoD-grade security engineering, energy utility compliance, cloud security advisory, and financial services governance gives him a cross-sector depth that his community engagement work then extends into the next generation of security professionals.
Tim Marsden — Chief Information Security Officer, Credit Acceptance
Tim Marsden joined Credit Acceptance as CISO in March 2024, bringing more than two decades of financial services and banking security experience. Before Credit Acceptance, he spent more than six years as CISO at Stifel Financial Corp in St. Louis, and before that spent eleven years at the Federal Reserve System as a technical and security consultant and manager overseeing risk management, SDLC release management, and the security trust model between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, including oversight of the National Incident Response Team. His background also includes product management roles at RBS Lynk and program management at CompuCredit. He has served as board president of the St. Louis InfraGard chapter and on the advisory board of SecureCo. That combination of central banking security oversight, capital markets security leadership, and auto finance risk management reflects a career that has moved through some of the most scrutinized environments in the financial sector.
Missouri’s Financial Security Leaders Are Built for Regulated Environments
What distinguishes this group is how many of them have spent years, in some cases decades, building security programs inside organizations where regulatory compliance is not optional and client trust is the product itself. Whether protecting retirement savings, mortgage applications for military families, insurance policyholders, workforce data, or auto financing customers, these leaders have built their careers understanding that security in financial services is ultimately about protecting people’s money and their trust in the institutions that hold it.
Discover more CISOs protecting the financial services sector:
