Editor’s Note: As Veritas Chronicles is committed to sharing good stories of good, it is my pleasure to share the good story of my mentor and guide, Peter R. Rancie. My piece about Peter here is not only intended to give readers a glimpse into what I believe is a remarkable life's journey, but also to introduce readers to the principles that inform and guide Peter and his team at Veritas Chronicles, of which I am a member. I have known Peter for twenty years, having first crossed paths with him while I was a university student when he showed interest in an international communications project I was developing. Though I was just an unrefined student with a half-baked idea, Peter encouraged me in a way that gave life not only to my project but also helped me unlock my untapped potential and have faith to take risks and expand my horizons. I believe everyone should have a good mentor. I am blessed to have Peter as mine. I hope you enjoy getting to know him a little through this profile piece: From Classroom to Boardroom.
Peter R. Rancie is an Australian entrepreneur and philanthropist. Though his day-to-day operations are largely US-based, Peter’s family origins trace back several generations to the British penal colony settlements established in Australia in the 18th century.
The first Australian Rancie, was a 14 year old youth from Scotland. John Rancie1 arrived in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in 1835, transported to hard labor and lifetime banishment to the antipodes for a minor offense. Peter is the sixth generation Rancie descended from these ignominious beginnings.2
Peter’s roots for all those generations were distinctly “working class.” He grew up in a government housing neighborhood re-purposed from a low-cost suburb initially built for athletes of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. “None of my forebears had more than high school education, both of my parents dropped out of school at age 14, Grade 8, in favor of menial work, and there was zero business experience in my known heritage. They were all working people, mostly unskilled labor,” he said.
While Peter believes he had excellent family, work ethic, and faith role models,3 there were no familial business, higher education, or public profile role models upon whose shoulders he could stand. Neither did he have any stellar prospects arising from the elementary and high schools he attended in his lower socio-economic upbringing.4
“If the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, let’s just say that I’ve done the journey of a thousand miles, one step at a time. I can hardly believe, myself, the places I’ve been and the things I’ve experienced. So, if we want to tell some part of the story at this time, let the relevant parts stand on their own without any embellishments,” he insists.
From his first professional job as an elementary school teacher, to his forays into entrepreneurship in media, film, conference resorts, banking, and financial services, Peter’s professional path is indeed a fascinating journey of a thousand miles — stepping away from a one-room country schoolhouse, his career eventually spanned multiple continents and an array of industries.
As a 20 year old, Peter’s teaching career began after graduating from what is now known as the Bendigo Campus of LaTrobe University, located in Victoria, Australia. Peter married his beautiful wife Christine in December, 1974, just weeks after both of them graduated. December 2024 marks their 50 years of marriage milestone. They are blessed by six children and thirteen grandchildren.
Peter’s first teaching assignment was at a school where he and his associates were tasked with piloting a new method of instruction called Open Design Schooling.
“It was a school of 300 children and 24 teachers,” Peter remembers. “We had to figure it out ourselves because it was an experimental design school. This brand new construction was something of a government foray into formalizing the free-thinking sixties. There were no guidelines, just big open areas with no dividing walls. At first, it was a shemozzle (meaning “a mess” [shemozzle is one of his favorite words for chaos]): clueless teachers, upset parents, and bewildered students. But after two years of trial and error we had morphed the school into something of an education paradise.”
For Peter, teaching was as much a learning experience for him as it was for his pupils. As he learned to navigate the new landscape of the experimental design school, his propensity to “figure things out” became a cornerstone philosophy in shaping what would become a successful and eclectic career.
From Classroom to Finance Industry
While Peter had entered the teaching profession thinking it would be his life’s work, it only took him three years to realize that an elementary school classroom wasn’t going to keep his mind engaged for the next forty or fifty years. Nor did he enjoy the daily confines of government bureaucracy. Without much forethought, as a 23 year old trained for nothing but elementary level classrooms, he exited his career as an educator. After a few years of experimenting with a variety of jobs, a brief and profitable stint selling advertising for the Yellow Pages paved the way for the major leap that would shape the rest of his professional life. Peter joined forces with his brother, Ken, in the madcap world of advertising.
Ken Rancie was running a home-based, one-man, advertising agency and was in desperate need of an employee or partner to share the load. Ken’s wife, Sharon, knowing her husband’s workload and frustration, had asked Peter to help his brother find qualified candidates to interview for the position.
“My first thought was to help him orchestrate interviews,” Peter reflects. “I brought to Ken’s office (his bedroom), every competent executive that I had worked with. The thought that I would step into this role didn’t occur to me.” However, as fate would have it, Peter turned out to be the only feasible candidate.
“After I’d made numerous introductions, I concluded that Ken wasn’t going to trust anyone. No one but me. Although I was untrained, unprepared, and blind-as-a-bat-business-wise, I jumped in with both feet. Thus began my career in advertising. The chance to be a growth and change agent for a multitude of disparate businesses has brought me everything else over the past 40 years.”
“I learned by doing, making a lot of mistakes along the way. I tell my kids, not entirely tongue in cheek, that everything I know now, I learned by doing it the wrong way the first time.”
“Eventually, though, I became something of a media strategist, negotiating a range of lucrative multimillion dollar deals for national television, radio, magazines, and newspapers, while initially, all the creative and production roles fell to Ken,” Peter recalls.
“We spent about 15 years as partners in various iterations of that marketing and advertising world. The way we blended creative ad concepts with paid media, high profile journalists, television and radio programming, and consumer impact, definitely left its mark on the bottom line of our national clients. It opened the doors of offices and boardrooms in Australia’s financial capitals that could hardly have been the dream of a couple of penurious boys brought up hanging around on the streets and practice fields of the former Olympic Village.”
One of their ad agency’s first big wins, though they hardly knew its significance at the time, occurred as they helped develop a quaint, 130-year-old insurance company, OST Friendly Society (OST stands for “Order of Sons of Temperance” — quaint) into a billion-dollar enterprise.
“In 1984 when we started with OST, despite all their history, they had only ever been a hole in the wall enterprise, and they had about one million dollars in assets,” Peter explains. “Across five years, through all sorts of ambition and trial and error, we helped them grow into a billion-dollar business. More importantly, that’s where we learned the ropes of the massive financial services industry.” After five years, OST was bought out by a larger company and the Rancie brothers had to go find their next big fish.
The success with OST helped propel Peter and Ken to the upper echelons of other financial organizations, including some of Australia’s most notable banking, insurance, and funds management giants; along the way, mixing with Australia’s leading media, entertainment, and investment professionals.
Peter shares, “As just one example of many, we developed an investment product and an advertising campaign that allowed Australia’s largest fund manager at the time, AMP Society, to draw in $150 million per week of cash deposits from the major national banks until the fund was filled. That was a record-breaking migration of consumer deposits from multiple banks to one fund manager.”
As Peter tells it, by creative problem solving, these two West Heidelberg lads, (their clients called them “The Boys”), eventually pushed out the world’s largest advertising agency, George Patterson Bates, from the AMP account, and they took over control of AMP’s $25 million annual ad spend.
During the AMP project, they worked with one of Australia’s leading journalists, a 60 Minutes icon, to develop The Investment Report, syndicating it into a daily digest, ultimately producing and distributing hundreds of finance stories and financial ideas to 50 talk-radio stations across Australia.
For St. George Bank, a subsidiary of Westpac Bank (one of Australia’s four major banking goliaths [in 2024 sitting at number 50 on the World’s Top 100 Banks list]), the brothers developed a 13-part mini drama tv series, with a new episode released at a fixed time every week in prime-time national television. The tv mini series was accompanied by 13 high quality booklets, each expanding the drama and adding relevant product news. The booklets were free but they could only be obtained by visiting a branch of the St. George Bank, creating massive new traffic into the branches. Peter commented that while the format was head turning, the real magic of that drama series is that, as a result of his negotiations, the national television network paid for most of the airtime out of its own programming budget. He told me that the adventures they had with banks, bankers, fund managers, and media networks are too numerous for a brief bio sketch, but those creative adventures made this pair one of the top 20 fastest growing, and by far the most unusual, ad agencies in Australia.
Australia’s top four banks are all listed among the world’s largest hundred banks. Peter’s acquired ability, from classroom to boardroom, to figure out the nuances and intricacies of the financial world, amongst those behemoths, developing innovative product designs and marketing solutions within that world, eventually enabled him to navigate beyond the shores of Australia.
“It has been a fascinating journey,” says Peter. “I’m more of an entrepreneur than a banker, but from quite humble beginnings. I’ve had the privilege of strategizing and problem solving with bankers and financial industry professionals all over the globe for 40 years. I’m not sure who else might have a similar story? From a quaint old insurance company, to the boardrooms of Australia’s biggest financial institutions, I’ve since been behind the closed doors of some of the huge banks and smaller private banks in Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, London, Zurich, Geneva, Lugano, and New York, with a vast array of negotiations and projects.”
Peter and his brother Ken spent about $300 million (in 2024 terms) of advertising and marketing for their clients during their partnership, generating millions of customers and billions of dollars of retail investment transfers between institutions.
US Community Banks
Curiously, Ken had devised a bank card concept designed to bring more value to bank customers than the typical card rewards available then (and now!). In 2011, they traveled to the US together to introduce this new concept via community banks, considering the USA as an ideal, larger, and more flexible market than Australia. Ken’s health and family circumstances regretfully meant that he couldn’t stay to see the project to its conclusion. Peter stayed, and as he always says, one thing leads to another.
For the past 13 years, Peter’s banking focus has been US community banks. That initial bank card excursion of the Rancies led them to be introduced by a Philadelphia-based law firm to Terry K. McEwen, a career banker and bank regulator. Terry had recently been the Director of Banking for the State of New Jersey, a $170 billion stewardship. During that tenure, Terry had also served as chairman of the 50-state committee that re-wrote the mortgage lending rules following the sub-prime lending disaster which triggered America’s 2008 financial catastrophe. This new friendship turned out to be a pivotal relationship in several ways. As a member of the African American minority, Terry’s friendship and experience helped school Peter in some of the USA’s cultural nuances, along with the woes of the unbanked and underbanked (that are still not being addressed by governments or financial institutions, except in a cursory way).
Under Terry’s banner and also independently, Peter has peered into the closets and viewed the skeletons of community banks across the United States, from New York to Philadelphia, Mobile to Atlanta, and Provo to Los Angeles. He has studied the financial statements, reviewed the actual books, negotiated solutions with owners and executives, and watched the FDIC’s operations at work, first hand.
“I didn’t have more than a generalized knowledge about US banks, especially community banks, when I first met Terry,” says Peter. “But now, after a dozen years and an untold number of analysis sessions and bank visits, I can look at any bank’s quarterly call reports, (standard regulatory public disclosures), and understand their strengths and weaknesses, capital ratios, core businesses, profit centers, and even the likely prospects of their success or failure with a high degree of accuracy. More importantly, I’ve learned to help bankers problem-solve in a manner specific to their needs. All of that has been catalyzed by Terry McEwen’s tutelage,” says Peter.
Based on that experience and his penchant for problem solving, Peter was invited to help re-draft the mission statement, re-define the core principles, and serve on the Policy Board of the United States Bankers Association (USBA — usbankers.org). He is currently the chairman of USBA’s Advisory Board. Unlike his entrepreneurial ventures with Ken, where the focus was so often on large financial institutions, the USBA is designed to help small-to-medium banks increase their profits, find new customer acquisition strategies, and choose new technologies, that will allow them to meet the challenge of competing in markets dominated by national and regional behemoths.
In this delicate interplay of global strategies and local needs, Peter’s work in the banking world expanded to include a more cause-driven, social impact focus, eventually leading him to a new entrepreneurial venture in the financial services industry. This time, however, it wasn’t as an advisor to financial organizations, but rather, it was as founder of a consumer-centric fintech ecosystem, with the objective to enhance the financial well-being of everyday Americans, including the non-banked and the underbanked.
Business is Organized Chaos
Peter is careful to correct the notion that “all is light and sweetness” along this decades long journey. Not every campaign was successful. Not every client relationship worked out. He is prone to quote a statistic from the realm of professional tennis, his own current sport of choice,5 where if you are winning 55% of points played, you are number one in the world. In other words, you are going to lose almost half the time you venture out, and the margin between winning and losing is only about 10% (the difference between 55/45). The winning is in the narrow margins.
“There are economic and business swings and roundabouts,” he says, “that are well beyond the control of one individual or enterprise, and people sometimes get hurt, lots of people sometimes get hurt,” he says with as much vehemence as I’ve seen in contrast to his usually calm demeanor, “but there is one certainty and one common trait across all my endeavors — if I’m winning, then everyone who is with me is also winning, the winningness gets spread around not hoarded. If I’m losing, when there is less money or time available to spread around, then I’m losing the most, by far. Every last dollar and every hour of every day are being used to spread whatever is available to the most people possible.”
Peter gave me some examples of situations where systemic shifts caught millions of people in their destruction. In the early 1990’s bank interest rates in Australia rose to 22%. That caused a real estate collapse and a general economic malaise in Australia which meant a massive set back to almost all small businesses. Real estate values dropped by 50% and asset values were wiped out. Another example occurred in 2008 with the subprime crisis, where the entire global financial system was on the brink of collapse. Peter explained that both situations caused irreparable and unavoidable losses to tens of millions of businesses and the families that depended on those jobs and businesses.
“It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are out in the marketplace “having a go,” there will be failures. Someone is not going to like you. Someone is going to like you. It will be like that, no matter how hard you try,” he concludes, “so trying to manage your life and conduct your business affairs based on popular opinion, of any kind or source, is a futile and destructive exercise. Creative efforts have to be driven by principle in service of a cause. For some people the cause is themselves (whether or not they admit it) and for some it is a commitment to live larger than their own self; to be serving something or someone larger than self-interest.”
Another form of chaos is the variety of personalities and systems one encounters. He says that many of his important experiences in major financial banking centers were not about marketing and business development. These endeavors focused on public and private wealth creation strategies, buying and selling of financial instruments, finance law, and financial policies. He notes that he has been exposed to the nasty underbelly of the financial world and escaped, by “grace alone,” the grasping and lures of charlatans and misfits scattered amongst the world of high finance. Ultimately, this is the reason he chose to focus on the much more “purely motivated,” less “systemically corrupted” and “solutions-needy” financial services sector, namely, community banking.
Social Impact in the Personal and Corporate DNA
Having spent decades raising millions of dollars for worthy causes, including his own foundations and charities, Peter was determined to utilize his experiences of people and projects spanning more than 40 years to make sure social impact was at the heart of whomever and whatever he aligned with. He says he has found — in what is likely to be the final and most important chapter for him — a convergence of competencies, capital, commerce, and cause. He is thriving on the privilege of alignment with other like-minded people from around the globe in a unique banking / e-commerce / exchange enterprise, with a worldwide perspective.
By way of “giving” background, alongside his forty years of banking and commercial activity, Peter established a national foundation in Australia in 1994, recruiting leading members of the political, legal, military, entertainment, sporting, and social regimes to support causes such as help for at-risk youth, and re-connecting families separated by war and migration from across the world; he has sponsored projects for housing, water, and social welfare in Australia, USA, South Africa, East Africa, and Indonesia; has been a decades long supporter of the work of Anasazi Foundation’s nationally recognized work with at-risk youth, among many other initiatives; one of his favorites is a project called, Applied Ancestry, which helps young people reconnect with their ancestral roots as a means of a more productive, stable and happy life in the present; the other favorite is the online publishing venture, Veritas Chronicles (the venue for this story), which is designed to shine a light on people and projects around the world, in the arts, medicine, science, energy, health, and socio-economic endeavors — featuring the people making a real and scalable difference, hence the tagline of Veritas Chronicles — Publishing Good Stories of Good (a phrase derived from the Bible, Isaiah 52:7).6
Despite his decades of experience, even combined with the aid of many high-profile celebrities, he has witnessed firsthand the perpetually challenging fund-raising needs of charities in their quest for social impact. So, he determined in advance that any engagement of his time and capital in a commercial ecosystem with a social impact mission should not have to always be proffering its “begging bowl” to stay funded. He was determined that any engagement in his more senior and more experienced years, must operate in a for-profit enterprise level format, while simultaneously structured as a not-for-profit charitable giving system.
Peter explains, “Through more than forty years of experience I have been granted membership to a team, of which I am just one member, to build a transaction and e-commerce engine powerful enough to open a campaign to enable 182 million struggling Americans to increase their buying power, and to simultaneously explode across the world, serving people in ways beyond that which I had previously considered,” he said.7
The Social Impact Mission he has joined, but not yet announced, is designed to operate as a public benefit corporation. Various beta tests conducted over several years by several members of the alliance, on multiple continents, have proven both the need and the demand, in many parts of the world.
“What the brilliant members of this alliance have designed is very different from building a sometimes exploitative, profit-driven, shareholder-driven, commercial system, even if a key objective is to raise money for charitable outcomes,” he insists, “and something better than my own imagination might have been able to devise.”
“Every part of this new ecosystem,” he explained, “uplifts its members and helps them get more value out of what they already have available to them.” (The values that will underpin the global alliance he has joined are included in the footnotes.8)
“Watch this space,” he concludes, with a wry grin.
In essence, Peter Rancie's story is a narrative of transformation, resilience, and dedication to making a difference in the world. From his early days as a teacher in Australia, descendant of a 19th century banished convict and inheritor of a working class status in impoverished West Heidelberg, to his work in the financial sector and his philanthropic endeavors, Peter's journey is a testament that no one is bound by their past, and that each person has the choice to make a significant impact in their chosen fields of endeavor. His story reaffirms that with vision, perseverance, and a heart for service, it's possible to traverse the globe's vast distances—one step at a time—while leaving a trail of positive change in one's wake. §
John Rancie was one of the hundreds of thousands of innocents (and some not so innocent) that were caught up in Britain’s “street sweeping” exercise of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The penal settlements in Australia were the direct result of the American Declaration of Independence. Until 1776, Britain had been sending its unwanted denizens to North America. Commencing in 1788, the settling of Australia — Terra Australis — by a colonial power, was the first time in history that an entire continent had been purposed as a giant, inescapable prison yard, separated from “civilization” by vast oceans.
Peter’s faith is that of a devout Christian. He possesses a profound respect for all people of faith seeking a godly life, regardless of denomination, culture, ethnicity, or persuasion. He was recently talking to a friend, John Hewlett. John told Peter that when he is asked about his faith or religion, he proudly tells any listener, “I am a charismatic (gifts of the Spirit), evangelical (preacher of the gospel), born again (baptized by water and the fire of the Spirit) disciple of Jesus Christ.” Peter told John that he was going to “steal” this moniker and to not complain when John heard “CEBA” coming from Peter’s own mouth, because it would lead to so many educational and uplifting conversations about personal faith and the good news of the gospel. Everyone, Peter told me, should be able to worship who, where or what they choose. He has visited many synagogues, mosques, cathedrals, churches, temples, memorial shrines, and met with persons of faith all around the world. He believes that God is the most inclusive being in the universe, inviting all to come to Him. Peter says he would not only uphold each person’s right to worship as they choose, he is in full support of campaigns that protect that right. Meantime, he delights in respectful dialogue with people about their diverse faith experiences.
Peter’s just-out-of-school severely limited experience in business and some of the “finer things,” in his early-20’s led to a few disasters he told me. He insists that being schooled for 15 years and graduating with a teaching degree qualified him for nothing but teaching school. Learning business was like learning a new language, but trying to acquire it as an adult rather than with the natural fluency of a child immersed in a language was more than challenging. While there were difficult learning experiences, with the benefit of hindsight some humorous stories emerged (though embarrassing bordering on ridiculous, at the time). He told me of one experience in his late 20’s. For some reason he had been invited to attend a private lunch, just four people, with the President of The Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA), at The Melbourne Club. The Melbourne Club, at that time, 1984, was still exclusive to men, a club for Australia’s business elite and the wealthy. The president of the RAIA was one such person, in his forties, born into wealth, and part of an elite cadre of professionals. On the other hand, Peter had never been to a restaurant other than two or three times to a Chinese buffet owned by local church members. He knew nothing of silver cutlery, silver service waiters, or the etiquette of such a place. Being one of seven children and being used to eating everything he could, when he could get it, he ordered everything on the menu, took extra bread rolls from the waiter, and was oblivious to his more polished associates waiting patiently for their meals while he devoured the dishes he had ordered. He had no idea which of the dozen silver utensils in front of him might be the right one for each course, nor did he know to use a butter knife for the butter rather than using his eating knife to dig in for slabs of butter. The litany of gaffes was long, he said. His first encounter with the more exclusive sector of the generally egalitarian Australian society resembled a scene out of the movie, “Dumb and Dumber.” As a West Heidelberg lad he was like a fish out of water, at that time, gasping. Learning to operate effectively at any level or type of society was just another step in the journey of 1,000 miles.
Peter has been a sports, fitness, and health zealot all his life. While competitive tennis is the present sports priority, in his younger years he was a semi-professional Australian Rules Football player invited to compete at Australia’s iconic sporting club, the Collingwood Magpies. He has played competitively almost anything that involves a ball: football, tennis, squash, basketball, baseball, table tennis, volleyball, cricket, plus track and field in high school and college. He has done many long distance and multi discipline endurance events including marathons, triathlons [including an IronMan], biathlons, and other endurance events such as kayaking, cross country skiing and cross country running. He always insisted his children should play a sport and play a musical instrument; to that end he plays woodwind, harmonica, and enough guitar to sing his younger children and grandchildren off to sleep each night “(unless they were just pretending to sleep so I would stop,” he laughs).
The principals/owners of Veritas Chronicles are Peter and Christine Rancie (their shared journey of fifty years is essentially the same story, though Christine’s is that of a mother and grandmother nurturing their six children and thirteen grandchildren), and Kristen Borchers (MA / Theology). Kristen is a single mother of six boys, ages 11-20. She has a Master of Arts Degree in Theology from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, graduating Suma Cum Laude, and inducted into the Phi Alpha Chi Scholastic Honor Society. Her undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Gordon College, Boston, also Suma Cum Laude. She is both Partner and Story / Research Principal at Veritas Chronicles (veritaschronicles.org). During the past 25 years, she has participated in and led dozens of hands-on social impact missions across the USA, Central America and the Caribbean, aiding with health care, food, clothing, home construction, orphanages, and education. Kristen is an accomplished teacher and writer, with a strong background in scientific research and linguistics, including the ability to function easily in any Spanish language setting. Kristen also has a pivotal role for Veritas Global Alliance as one of the principal stewards of the Social Impact Mission, representing the social impact target audience. The mission of Veritas Chronicles is twofold: 1. Telling the stories of people doing great things in arts, medicine, science, energy, health, socio-economic solutions, etc. 2. Collecting the stories of people from all around the world, especially those of the older generation, those whose life spans are rapidly declining, so that their faith perspectives and experiences can be recorded for posterity, to serve their own families and any others who are interested.
According to Forbes Magazine, and supported by other reputable reports, 70% of US adults struggle to make ends meet every month (https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024).
A synopsis of the governing values of the Yet-To-Announced-Global-Alliance: (a) Veritas — means truth in Latin; using Veritas as part of the mission signifies the truth of a bold idea — the truth that the Social Impact Mission on which we have all embarked is actually a social obligation, for the willing. This mission is much in demand, everywhere; and the global need and mission are greater than any one of us. Therefore — veritas, truly — each of us is a small player in a great undertaking. (b) Align — alignment of the social impact mission with: capital sources, executives, service providers, members, and beneficiaries; all of whom acknowledge the divine spark of humanity and value individual sovereignty; a community committed to serving needs beyond self-interest. (c) Thrive — thriving is an active condition of growth extending beyond financial matters; it encompasses human flourishing with a holistic approach to and by individuals, families and communities committed to living abundantly. (d) Prosper — prosperity in this context means breaking old cycles of poverty and low expectations, with more people moving beyond mere survival or meeting basic needs, towards financial momentum within an ecosystem designed for making the world better, on a large scale.