Leigh Phillips is the President and CEO of SaverLife, a national nonprofit and advocacy organization dedicated to improving the financial health of people with low-to-moderate incomes. Since joining SaverLife in 2015, Leigh led SaverLife’s transformation from a local direct service organization to a national nonprofit that launched the first ever financial health platform designed specifically to meet the needs of low-to-moderate income households. Today, SaverLife reaches over 650,000 members nationwide.
Prior to joining SaverLife, Leigh was the founding Director of the San Francisco Office of Financial Empowerment. Under Leigh’s leadership, the SF OFE spearheaded several “first in the nation” programs, including Bank On San Francisco, the first municipally led effort to bank the unbanked that became a national movement, and Kindergarten to College, the first universal and automatic college savings program for public school children. On the national level, Leigh was instrumental in the creation of the Cities for Financial Empowerment Coalition and currently sits on the Board of Directors of the CFE Fund.
Leigh served as Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Consumer Advisory Board from 2021 to 2022. She previously served as Chair of the Board of the Mission Economic Development Agency and on the Advisory Board of the start-up Level Money, which was acquired by Capital One. Leigh’s work has been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Economist, Time Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and on NPR and CNN.
Leigh received both her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Social Sciences and a Masters of Economic and Social Sciences in Women’s Studies from the University of Manchester, in her native United Kingdom. She now lives in the Washington DC area with her husband and two daughters.