Frank J. Hanna III is an American entrepreneur and merchant banker who has been described as "one of the leading Catholic philanthropists in the USA."[1]
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Hanna credits his experiences growing up around his father's real estate business as preparing him for the business world.[2] After studying at the University of Georgia, where he earned BBA and JD degrees,[3] Hanna and his younger brother David invested $160,000 in a bid to test a method he had devised for helping companies rid themselves of bad loans. This led to the brothers' founding an investment firm that they later sold.[2]
Frank Hanna has served as CEO of administrative services firm HBR Capital, Ltd. since 1992. He has held the position of CEO of investment firm Hanna Capital, LLC since 2006. He has also been Director of the Atlanta-based CompuCredit Corporation since 1999. He previously held a corporate attorney position with Troutman Sanders, an Atlanta law firm.[3] Hanna was one of three entrepreneurs profiled in the Acton Institute's documentary film, The Call of the Entrepreneur.[4]
Frank Hanna's brother David is the CEO and Chairman of the Board of CompuCredit.[5] The Hanna brothers' father, Frank Hanna, Jr., chairs the Washington, D.C.-based Paladin Capital Group,[6] a fund dedicated solely for the Homeland Security sector. Hanna, Jr. is also a major shareholder in CompuCredit.[6]
The Hanna family has long been involved in supporting Catholic charities, including helping to start three new Catholic schools in Atlanta.[7] In 2002, Hanna was chosen by George W. Bush as co-chair of the President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.[8][9] In 2007, Hanna received the Philanthropy Roundtable's William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership "for his national leadership in K-12 education reform."[7]
Pope Benedict XVI named Hanna a Knight of the Grand Cross in the Order of St. Gregory, and Hanna is a Knight of Malta, a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre, and serves on the boards of the Papal Foundation and the St. John Vianney Seminary.[3] Hanna is the founder of the Solidarity Association, which obtained portions of the Bodmer Papyri, including the oldest extant copy of portions of the Gospels of Luke and John. In January 2007, Hanna presented the papyri to the Pope. They were transported from Switzerland to the Vatican in "[a]n armed motorcade surrounded by people with machine guns."[10] According to one source, "Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, Bishop Raffaele Farina, prefect of the Vatican Library, and Gary Krupp, founder of the Pave the Way Foundation, which worked to bring about this gift, were present when the papyrus was donated to the Vatican."[11] They are kept in the Vatican Library and will be made available for scholarly review, and in the future, excerpts may be put on display for the general public.[10]
In 2008, The Crossroad Publishing Company published Hanna's What Your Money Means: And How to Use It Well (ISBN 978-0824525200). The book presents Hanna's perspective on healthy attitudes towards money and his advice about philanthropic strategies. In a review published by the Philanthropy Roundtable, George Weigel said of the book that,
Hanna has written a truly radical book, in both the popular and classical sense of the adjective. "Radical," after all, derives from the Latin word radix, meaning root, and What Your Money Means gets us to the root of the matter. It's a primer on the meaning of wealth, in which Hanna thinks aloud with his readers about material possessions—and what it means to have a lot of them—with the aid of some neatly explained philosophical and moral principles. How to Use It Well is the provocation: a proposal for disposing of wealth that, if taken seriously and adopted widely, could change the face of American philanthropy, dramatically.[12]