H&R Block wants to be more than a tax company. It wants to be your year-round financial advisor

Curtis Campbell knows exactly what kind of company people think H&R Block is.

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It is the place you go in late winter or early spring when your W-2s, 1099s, deductions, and deadlines are piling up, your refund feels urgent, and your anxiety is rising. It is familiar, local, and useful, but not the kind of company that usually comes to mind when people think about product velocity, AI deployment, or a culture of experimentation.

Campbell wants to change that.

The new CEO, who previously served as H&R Block’s president and chief product officer, is trying to turn the 70-year-old tax preparation giant into something more expansive: a year-round financial platform powered by software, data, and AI, while preserving the human trust that has long set the company apart. That means reimagining H&R Block not just as a seasonal tax brand, but as a business that can advise creators, serve small businesses, help customers manage money, and use technology to automate the most tedious parts of tax prep, so employees can focus on judgment, relationships, and guidance.

For Campbell, this is an operational exercise rather than a branding one. “Fundamentally, we do taxes, but we’re really not in the tax business,” he tells Fortune. “We’re in the business of trust and confidence.”

Campbell is leading H&R Block through a volatile tax period, as sweeping tax-law changes collide with a significantly downsized IRS. What he hears from the field is that clients want help understanding what the changes mean and reassurance that they are not missing out on money or making mistakes.

That urgency could benefit assisted tax preparation in the near term. But Campbell’s ambition reaches well past one potentially chaotic filing season.

More than a tax company

Campbell’s core thesis is that H&R Block should no longer think of itself as a company that shows up for customers once a year. He wants it to be present throughout the year, serving customers on their journey toward financial freedom.

Such a pivot requires looking beyond tax preparation, he says, to adjacent services such as payroll, bookkeeping, tax advisory, small-business support, and banking. It also means using the company’s enormous dataset and physical footprint to build continuous relationships with customers.

Campbell describes a future in which H&R Block becomes more embedded in clients’ lives, moving from “a once-a-year engagement” to “a multiyear engagement.”

He sees a strong opening in the growing ranks of independent workers, creators, and influencers who are suddenly operating as small businesses without fully understanding the financial infrastructure that comes with that shift. H&R Block launched a Creator Suite earlier this year, bundling tax help with bookkeeping, payroll, and related services for people whose work may span multiple income streams and business entities.

“That’s a really interesting group for us to target,” Campbell says of creators. “They’re folks whose tax situation becomes more complex over time, so they’re more needy because they’re advancing their business, they’re growing their sort of portfolio of different services and offerings.”

The same logic applies to small businesses, which Campbell calls H&R Block’s fastest-growing business and one he believes Wall Street still undervalues. The opportunity is straightforward: Small-business owners do not want to spend their time on payroll, bookkeeping, and tax compliance. They want to run their businesses.

“I’ve yet to meet a small-business owner who loves taxes or payroll or bookkeeping,” he says. “They just love the thing that they do.”

The AWS playbook comes to tax prep

What makes Campbell an intriguing fit for this moment is that he does not fit the stereotype of a tax executive. He is a Southern-born tech leader who spent years at Dell and AWS, companies known for fast-moving product cycles and quick execution. He talks in the language of critical assumptions, hypotheses, road maps, and experiments. He sounds more like a cloud executive than the steward of a legacy tax brand. That is partly the point.

Campbell is trying to make H&R Block more technologically fluent, not just in what it sells but in how it operates. He says the company has spent considerable time defining its “ideal state,” mapping the assumptions required to get there, and building a long-term road map. From there, teams identify the questions they need to answer and the experiments required to answer them. Its pace has picked up sharply in recent years.

“Before I joined H&R Block, on average, we ran about five experiments a year,” he says. “This year, we’re going to average about 123.”

That shift is partly cultural. Campbell has pushed H&R Block to act more like a learning organization, drawing on a lesson from Amazon: The companies that build the fastest feedback loops are often the ones best positioned to win over time.

That has also required changing the company’s approach to failure. In