Pentair has appointed Robert W. Hau as executive vice president and chief financial officer, effective 1 November 2026, filling a seat that has been held on an interim basis.
Hau, 60, spent almost a decade as executive vice president and chief financial officer of Fiserv, from March 2016 to October 2025. Before that he was executive vice president and chief financial officer of TE Connectivity from 2012 to 2016, and of Lennox International from 2009 to 2012. He began his career with twenty two years in senior finance roles at Honeywell. He holds an MBA from the University of Southern California and a bachelor of science in business administration from Marquette University.
An interim seat made permanent
Robert P. Fishman has been serving as interim chief financial officer and continues through 1 November 2026, which gives a clean handover date rather than an overlap. John L. Stauch, Pentair's president and chief executive, described the hire in terms of what the role needs: "Bob is a proven leader with the strategic perspective, financial expertise and results-oriented approach to help Pentair drive performance."
The disclosed terms are conventional for a large cap finance seat: a base salary of 775,000 dollars, a bonus target of 100 per cent of base, a 2.5 million dollar restricted stock unit grant that cliff vests after five years, and a 200,000 dollar signing bonus repayable if he resigns within two years.
Hired for integration, on the evidence
The five year cliff on the equity is the most telling line in the filing. Annual or graded vesting pays a chief financial officer for each year served; a single cliff at year five pays only for staying the course, and boards use it when the work they have in mind does not resolve inside two or three years.
What that work is likely to be is not hard to infer. Pentair is working through a 1.4 billion dollar acquisition of Taco Group Holdings, expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, which lands within weeks of Hau's start date. A chief financial officer arriving at a company mid deal inherits the financing, the purchase accounting, the synergy reporting and the integration of two finance functions, and the credibility of the numbers through that period is his.
His record fits that brief closely. Fiserv over his tenure was one of the more acquisitive companies in payments, and TE Connectivity and Lennox are both industrial manufacturers with the same working capital and segment reporting problems Pentair has. This is not a chief financial officer brought in to reinvent how the company is financed; it is one brought in to absorb a transaction without the reporting coming apart.
