Greg McGreevy – Brigit

Greg McGreevy was deep in the Brazilian rainforest when he first understood the limits of watching. He had traveled there as an anthropology graduate with a degree in biological anthropology from the University of Maryland in hand to work alongside an indigenous community, documenting their lives, their land disputes and their tangled relationship with a government that often forgot they existed. He was supposed to observe. Take notes. Write it up. That, he found, was the problem.

Greg McGreevy | Brigit | Vice President, Head of Legal

The things he witnessed — displacement, property conflicts, the casual indifference of bureaucratic power — demanded a response. Anthropology, almost by definition, could not provide one. It was a discipline built on neutrality, on watching and recording without intervening. For someone wired toward advocacy, toward fairness, toward the practical resolution of problems that seemed eminently solvable, that wasn’t enough. The rainforest, oddly, pointed him toward law.

“I saw a lot of things there as far as problems with the government and property, and I didn’t want to sit there and watch it,” McGreevy says.

From the jungle to the bar

After Brazil, McGreevy spent time in Spain, teaching English, traveling, and thinking seriously about what he wanted his professional life to look like. He had no lawyers in the family — neither of his parents had gone to college — and his understanding of the profession came mostly from television. But when he considered what he was actually good at and what energized him intellectually, the list mapped cleanly onto what law demands: reading comprehension, analytical thinking, rhetoric and an appetite for complexity. He took the LSAT, enrolled at Brooklyn Law School, and found that the instincts he had built studying human behavior translated surprisingly well to legal reasoning.

“I’ve always liked complex issues and analytical thinking. Like studying philosophy and anthropology — things aren’t always just what they seem,” he says.

McGreevy graduated at one of the worst possible moments: the height of the 2008 financial crisis. The traditional associate pipeline had largely collapsed, which pushed him toward in-house work sooner than he had expected. What initially felt like a constraint became, over time, a revelation. In-house counsel operates with a different philosophy than the firm attorney. The firm minimizes risk at almost any cost. In-house, you learn to live with risk — to quantify it, contextualize it, and decide whether the business justification is worth it.

From there, McGreevy built an unusually varied résumé: litigation research at Zurich North America, five years as a vice president at Morgan Stanley, stints at OneMain Financial and PayPal. Each stop added texture. Then came Dave, the consumer fintech, where, as senior counsel, he helped build a legal department from scratch and guide the company on its path to profitability post-IPO. When Brigit came calling in October 2024, he had a template — and the confidence to use it.

Building a legal function

Brigit is a personal financial wellness app built around the premise that its data makes it hard to argue with: roughly 40 percent of Americans have less than $400 set aside for an emergency. The company’s flagship product is earned wage access, which allows users to access their wages early when a car breaks down or an unexpected bill arrives before payday. Wrapped around that core product is a suite of financial wellness tools — overdraft alerts, financial insights, credit monitoring, and Credit Builder, a loan product that simultaneously helps build savings and improve credit. Upbound Group, a publicly traded holding company that also owns the lease-to-own service Acima, acquired Brigit in January 2025 for $460 million. McGreevy served as the sole in-house attorney on Brigit’s side of that deal.

He arrived to build something durable: governance frameworks, compliance infrastructure, outside counsel relationships, repeatable processes that would allow legal to join the conversation from the beginning rather than serve as a last-minute checkpoint. He is currently working alongside one other attorney, building toward a department that scales with the business. For someone who spent years observing other organizations’ legal functions — noting what worked, filing away what didn’t — it is, in many ways, the job he spent his career preparing for.

“There is no right way. You’re kind of just adapting to the business,” he says.

Navigating a new regulatory frontier

The most complicated terrain McGreevy occupies today isn’t structural — it’s the evolving and inconsistent regulatory landscape surrounding earned wage access. EWA is a young product category, and regulators across more than a dozen states have been moving to define it, often arriving at dramatically different conclusions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has largely stepped back, creating a vacuum that states are filling independently, producing a patchwork of laws and opinions that McGreevy describes as genuinely difficult to navigate.

He has responded by becoming an active participant in shaping those rules. He has testified before state legislatures, partnered with government relations teams to help draft EWA-specific legislation, and engaged directly with state enforcement authorities. He is patient when explaining the product’s purpose and firm when it is mischaracterized. Brigit, he is careful to emphasize, is not a payday lender — a conflation he encounters often and pushes back on every time.

“People who criticize this product see it very differently from the people who actually use it. Their stories about how it’s helped them are what inspire me — that’s why I work here,” he says.

The customer base McGreevy describes is diverse and often overlooked by traditional financial institutions: immigrants rebuilding credit from scratch, workers whose pay cycles don’t align with their expenses, and others who find themselves shut out of the traditional financial system. The product exists not because these customers are irresponsible, but because the systems around them were not built with them in mind.

“In a perfect world, people wouldn’t need a product like this because they’d be paid a living wage,” he says. “Brigit can’t change price inflation and wage stagnation, but we can help people work their way through it.”

Looking ahead, McGreevy wants to spend more time doing the work publicly — more panels, more conferences, more direct engagement with the policy conversations shaping the EWA space. His anthropology training, he notes, taught him that perspective is everything: what looks troubling from a distance can look entirely reasonable up close, once you understand the context. That lesson has made him a more effective advocate than any law school course he has taken.

At home, life runs on a soccer schedule — both sons are deeply into the sport, something McGreevy accepts partial responsibility for. He coaches, snowboards, reads, and travels when the calendar allows. Inside Brigit, he finds the work genuinely satisfying in ways that larger institutions rarely produce. The startup environment means every day is different, the regulatory frontier is still being drawn, and the legal function he is building will shape how the company operates for years to come.

For someone who once stood in a rainforest and decided that watching wasn’t enough, that’s exactly the point.